


Children and Fools

by Alona



Category: Fly By Night Series - Frances Hardinge
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-10
Updated: 2017-11-10
Packaged: 2019-01-31 09:04:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12678735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alona/pseuds/Alona
Summary: When an underdog candidate promises a handsome reward to anyone who will help him win an election, world famous election advisers Mosca Mye and Eponymous Clent are on the job. The job is more complicated, not to mention more dangerous, than Mosca expected.





	Children and Fools

**Author's Note:**

  * For [salamandercity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/salamandercity/gifts).



> This story really picked me up and ran screaming into the night. Thank you so much for your fantastic prompt, and I hope you have a lovely Yuletide season! ♥

The furniture had been stacked and scrunched into a mural against the wall. The drapes had been drawn back as far as possible to invite in the autumn sunlight. The little anteroom, overall, was so well fooled out of its own sense of proportion that it echoed in imitation of a cathedral to Mosca Mye's step. Silhouetted against the window, Mosca marched before a group of mismatched listeners, hands folded behind her back, a not-quite-thirteen-year-old general reviewing her troops and finding the state of their boots wanting.

She screeched to a halt.

"You all know why we're here!" she rapped out.

Two of the students jumped. The third looked bored, though he might simply have fallen asleep standing up. The ancient professor blinked curiously at her, and the dashing woman who had introduced herself as a merry blacksmith's widow gave her an encouraging wink.

Mosca felt self-conscious of her play-acting for a moment. Then she remembered what the stakes were and got angry instead. "It's two weeks to Election Day. Mr. Pontivy's got his people out there frightening and nagging people into voting him back in and trying to scare us from raising our voices. Now, all that's good."

"Er, how is it good, exactly?" one of the nervous students asked. He was called Talley; his friend, or possibly his brother, was Crex. They were studying rhetoric at the University, which had sounded promising when Talley had first shown up to ask if Mosca still had any openings among her volunteer campaigners.

"Means he's scared," Mosca answered. "Means he's taking Mr. Beech seriously." Which was more than Mosca had been expecting when she and Eponymous Clent had arrived in the city of Corseul and offered their services as world-renowned election experts. Hardly a day before that, Mosca had had the wispiest possible notion of just what an election was. It had all sounded very unlikely to her, and now, in the thicket of campaigning, it felt more unreal, not less.

"Even I'm starting to take Arvor Beech seriously, with you and your associate puffing him up," said Mistress Walty, the self-proclaimed merry widow. She was one of the tallest women Mosca had ever met, broad-shouldered, with unexpectedly delicate features and blue, blue eyes. She was one of those people who would always be noticed. "So what do you need us for?"

"If you're here, it's because you aren't scared. So I need you to make noise. Drown out Mr. Pontivy's hirelings. Talk to people, tell 'em why they'd better vote for Mr. Beech. Remind them how Mr. Pontivy's only holding off on taking over the University 'cause he's waiting for the election to be done and everyone to stop paying attention. Remind them last time somebody took over the University, it was…"

"Birdcatchers," Professor Kittiwake whispered. His voice was thin and bleating, but his clouded gaze was sure. "I was Dean of the School of Mathematics when they came and started telling us what we could and could not teach. Whole departments were thrown out, or worse. We were afraid, I do not deny it, and they were too powerful to fight – the head of the University himself…" He stopped and held his throat, as if the words were too painful to bring up. "We made them work for it, though. We were slow, we wasted pencils and hid records, we forgot where our classes had been put and when all else failed we got sick and kept to our beds. They caught on to it, of course…"

After that the professor said nothing for such a long time that Mosca began to think his mind had wandered away. Then he took up the thread again: "This talk of taking the University is all because Mandelion holds strong. And I – I am old man, and I am not afraid to say I support the brave revolutionaries of Mandelion. Miss Mye, I will fight in their name to keep the University free. Command me." And to Mosca's horror, he dipped her a creaking, rusted courtly bow.

"That's very good, professor, thank you, get up, now," she murmured hurriedly. Among University folk, it turned out, the name of Quillam Mye's daughter was one to conjure with; Mosca had not yet determined just what it was conjuring. "You've got very fine-sounding ideas. Maybe you'd like to talk to Mr. Clent, see if he can't work some of that into one of his speeches for Mr. Beech."

_Minus the parts about supporting the Mandelion revolutionaries, anyways._

Corseul's strange practice of choosing their own leader once every seven years was a holdover from some older, mostly forgotten people who had melted into Corseul's general population. Mayors past had had to truckle to the University to gain support, and so a free-thinking culture had sprung up around it. The students had acquired a reputation for rioting, which had lain dormant as the culture grew self-satisfied over the decades. The Civil War had changed all that. Corseul had been the center of a number of battles, and the University had taken up arms. Then, in Corseul as elsewhere, the Birdcatchers had stepped in. Corseul, as elsewhere, had suffered.

Since joining the realm in overthrowing the Birdcatchers, the University had enjoyed peace, prosperity, and a mutually beneficial arrangement with the local Company of Stationers. Elections had run smoothly, the same scion of an old and wealthy family being chosen time and again by a spooked citizenry seeking stability. But in secret the fire of free thought had been rekindled.

The situation had become abruptly untenable when Mandelion had given the entire country a shove in just the right spot and left it windmilling for balance. Now the incumbent Escrow Pontivy talked of imposing controls on the University, to contain dangerous ideas. His threats had created a vacuum to be filled by a willing challenger – that challenger was Arvor Beech.

A week ago Mosca and Clent had been dining upon scraps outside a village inn a day's walk from Corseul. A fine coach had stopped to rest its horses in the inn's yard, and they had overheard the gossip of the footmen with the stable hand: the election in Corseul was weeks away, and Arvor Beech was desperate to win it. If he won, he would grant a favor – his considerable financial resources were cited – to those who had helped him do it.

A day later, Mosca and Clent had been in Beech's office in Beech's magnificent house of yellow-pink local stone, rhapsodizing on the subject of their surpassing persuasive powers.

"And after all," Clent had said on the road to Corseul (in among delivering himself of a lecture on the Idea of Democracy and being overwhelmingly peppered with questions by his auditor), "it is not as though we shall be feeding them a tissue of lies. We have every intention of seeing the chain of office secured around this brave challenger's neck, and I doubt whether there are two enterprising souls in this county more qualified than our humble selves to sway the hearts and minds of the populace."

"Better make sure they pay us some in advance," Mosca had responded. "Just in case we can't sway 'em and have to flee under cover of darkness."

"Mm, yes," had been Clent's laconic response.

And he had secured a stipend for the duration of their services, borrowed against their eventual fee, of course.

Not quite a week after sealing the bargain with Beech, Mosca stood in a room of that same magnificent house of Beech's. In front of her were her troops. She wore a new dress of cream muslin paid for out of that stipend, the first dress she could remember wearing that actually fit her. Her shoes had been resoled. She was clean and well fed. She felt brisk and competent and pleasantly warlike.

In the event, the populace _had_ been swayed. And more than that: Pontivy was now taking Arvor Beech seriously, to be sure; but it also, miraculously, appeared to be the case that Pontivy and indeed the whole city were taking Mosca Mye and Eponymous Clent, Election Advisors, seriously.

"You'll go out in pairs," Mosca decided, "on account of Mr. Pontivy's bully boys lurking down every alley." Beech's own household staff had not fared well over the last few days. A doctor had been summoned just the night before to see to the gaping head wound of a footman who had run afoul of some men who could not absolutely be said to have been employed by Pontivy. "One of you is coming with me and Saracen. Don't all fight over the chance or nothin'," Mosca added.

Saracen had been his usual charming self from the moment his webbed foot had first touched Corseul soil, winning him a vocal assortment of admirers of the sort that preferred to do their admiring from afar. After a speaking silence, Mistress Walty offered to accompany Mosca. From the attitude of the rest, she may as well have been offering herself as a human sacrifice. That was all just as Mosca might have chosen it. She could understand what had brought the others here: the professor had convictions, the students were wealthy or bored or lured by the promise of a free meal. But what of Mistress Juniper Walty? Was she a thrill-seeker drawn by the promise of violence? Did she care so much about getting Beech elected?

Mosca and Clent had been making use of Beech's household to spread their message thus far, but Mosca, who had been having some luck mining the local population of urchins and shop girls for information, had decided it might be wise to cast a wider net.

She sent Crex with the professor and Talley with the somnambulating student, whose name was Tripe. She fed them a few digestible lines of argument and directed them towards the quarters of the city where they were least likely to be set upon by Pontivy's men. The ones with wider streets, mostly, and citizens who liked their quiet undisturbed.

"Come on, Mistress Walty," she said once the others were on their way and she had secured Saracen's attention. "We'll take the Flats."

"Ah," Mistress Walty answered wisely. "We will be needing the goose, then."

Mosca stopped in the courtyard to leave word of where she was headed, and then the three of them, girl, woman, and goose, left Beech's imposing home bound for the Flats.

The Flats sat on the seaward face of town, its winding, drooping, pile-propped streets dissolving limply into the miles of marshland that somewhere gave way to the sea. The horizon was always misty there, and if Mosca looked closely at the band where earth-sea met sea-sky, her vision would etch in the lines of tall ships' rigging: there was a barrier island out there, carrying Corseul's small port on its humped back.

The Flats was one of the most populous neighborhoods, and also one of the poorest. Over-eager proponents of Arvor Beech were most likely to have an unpleasant encounter there. Mosca had some ideas about what else they might encounter.

Between declaiming ably at the doorsteps of the ramshackle but proudly painted houses of the Flats, Mistress Walty tried to pry Mosca's life story out of her.

"And just how does a girl like you come to be an election advisor in company with a man like this Clent?"

"We're business partners," Mosca answered glibly. "We have interests in common."

Incredulously, Mistress Walty echoed, "Interests?"

"Words," Mosca clarified. "And seeing new things and meeting new people." _And money. And our own hides._ "I've had a varied and elite education, preparing me for an unusual degree of creative independent thought," she added, borrowing a turn of phrase from Clent himself.

"Sounds dangerous," murmured Mistress Walty with a chuckle.

For a moment Mosca tilted her head to look up sidelong at her tall companion. There had been something unusual in her voice.

They had reached the end of a street, and very nearly the end of the city. The street was a boardwalk standing three feet above the slime-filmed pools and the ground tufted with hardy marsh grass. A hard smell of brine was blowing in from the sea. The whole world was yellow-green, save for the specks of white wading birds far from the city. Mosca prepared to turn back.

What was that noise? A rustle, a shushing, a snick. Two men, drably dressed and spattered with slime, swarmed up from the sides of the boardwalk. One of them was armed with a wicked-looking knife. They were between Mosca's party and the way back.

"Mistress Walty – "

The merry widow looked at the men. She looked at Mosca, blue eyes round and desperate. She looked back at the men.

"It's her we want," the leader said, gesturing at Mosca.

Mistress Walty answered, "She's nothing to do with me."

"Get on then. And don't let us hear this getting around."

Mistress Walty picked up her skirts and ran.

Mosca could not understand what had happened, but it did not matter. She could see a long spit of land among the pools to either side of the boardwalk. She stooped to grab Saracen, meaning to jump with him off the edge of the boardwalk.

One of the men caught her around the waist. She twisted and kicked, was momentarily free, then found her arms pinioned. From a confused yelp of pain she knew Saracen had entered the fray, and struggled harder herself. Where was the knife?

The bottom fell out of the world.

It came back with a painful jar and a cold splash. Mosca fought free of her captor to find herself standing in a foot of water, one side of her dress scummy and dripping. They had fought their way right off the boardwalk. The man she had fallen with was still rising, the knife in his hand. She aimed a kick at his wrist. He dropped the knife, cursing, and Mosca darted back. The man wasted no time feeling around for his weapon. He stood in Mosca's likeliest path to land. The other man stepped off the boardwalk and joined his companion in circling Mosca. Saracen was out of sight.

"What do you want with me?" Mosca tried. All the defiance in her voice drained out into the flat landscape. But at least water was an element she understood.

The man who had had the knife laughed. It was a stage laugh, a nasty laugh. He did not find this funny. He did not care.

Mosca crouched and prepared to fight for her life.

***

It was a bruised and draggled but very living Mosca who stumbled into the closet-office she shared with Clent later that day to find Clent hastily shoveling papers into a leather portfolio. Seeing her, he stopped, spilled the papers back onto the desk, and began packing them away as fussily as though they were fine china being stowed for a sea voyage.

"Letters from our friends, Mr. Clent?" asked Mosca hoarsely. "Or… not our friends?"

"Fear not, child, our erstwhile _employers_ have not yet caught wind of us, or else they are biding their time. I have missives of a personal nature for you from more than one denizen of our former stomping grounds. I shall hold onto them until you are less besmirched." He ceased his ministrations upon the papers and studied her closely. "Beloved above, Mosca, how _did_ you get so filthy? What is the matter? Has the avian nightmare turned marauder? Here – " hastily clearing writing materials off a stool that was nominally Mosca's " – you aren't fit to keep your feet."

Mosca dropped onto the stool with a clatter. She sat shivering and blinking for a long moment. Then, in a squeaking voice, she managed, "Don't you breathe a word against Saracen." A scraping cough. "We were out canvassing for Mr. Beech an' I walked us into a trap in the Flats an' that Mistress Walty as looks fit for anything took off like a spooked deer an' I'd be dead if it weren't for Saracen an' all 'cause I was tryin' to catch a hint of our employers but I didn't look careful enough and they nearly got me." She was out of breath as she finished.

"I absolve The Goose," said Clent. "Though I daresay your own guile would have seen you safe. Now, would you say you did manage to sniff out, um…" He seemed curiously hesitant to question her.

"Nearly got drowned, didn't I, so I'm prob'bly looking in the right place." Mosca had wrestled to get the slime off her dress, but the slime had won the first round. "Those cutthroats were Locksmith trained, or I'm a parsnip."

Clent did not ask how she knew this. They had both gained enough unwilling expertise in identifying Locksmiths and their allies in the past months to last them several lifetimes. And that was not even the main reason they were determined to put as much distance between them and the Locksmiths as possible.

It had not been enough to defer Aramai Goshawk's offer of employment. Wherever Clent and Mosca went, they were known by that ruthless body of men. And whenever those men had a particularly unsavory and irksome knot to untie and found a certain wily and infamous pair within their grasp, they needed only to jingle the suspended sentence of death over Mosca and Clent's heads to see the offending knot sliced to ribbons. Every time, it had made Mosca biting mad. But, every time, she and Clent had had no choice but to go along with it.

So it was not surprising that when the opportunity had been presented to Mosca to use her unofficial position to convey secret messages for the radicals of Mandelion, she had jumped at the chance.

She had been faced with the difficulty of finding an argument that would tempt Clent into going along with such a wildly risky scheme, right under Goshawk's nose, as it were. Not seeing that any argument would suit, Mosca had gone ahead and committed them both without mentioning it to Clent. She had gambled extravagantly on him backing her play when he did find out. It still surprised her somewhat that he had.

For months they had shunted messages, and sometimes people, along Mandelion's growing network of supporters, flagrantly using passwords and contacts gleaned from the Locksmiths to ease their way. Mosca had had the satisfaction of seeing fear give way to a scheming excitement in the countryside. The sense of power had all but outweighed the constant niggling danger. Clent had spun their adventures out into thrilling and heavily fictionalized poems, which had kept them in funds.

But the balance could not hold forever – the Locksmiths had caught on, and Mosca and Clent had fled as far and fast as they could, shedding all their money and possessions in the process.

In any event, Mosca's nameday was approaching, though it was an open question whether Goshawk was more interested in collecting on her not quite promise or in seeing her head on a pike. A question Mosca and Clent had no interest in seeing answered. They had been heading for the coast, with a vague intention of lying their way onto a ship bound for foreign shores.

Arvor Beech's offer of a reward to anyone who could get him elected had come at the perfect moment. Here was the money they would need to pay their way.

The only concern was whether they had outpaced their pursuit sufficiently to stay in one place for as long as it took to get the reward.

Mosca had also wondered what they would do when they reached those foreign shores; Clent was untroubled. With their talents, he had intimated, they might succeed at anything. Also, he was writing a play entitled _The Grand Revolt of Mandelion_. He was sure he would find a ready market for it. Towards this end, he regularly rummaged among Mosca's memories of the event – freely discarding or reshaping any oddments he found that would not slot into his vision – and asked her to supply dialogue for the "low, vulgar, crowd-pleasing characters." (Mosca had had some low, vulgar things to say to this.)

Whatever they were going to do, though, they would not be in any state to do it if the Locksmiths got hold of them first.

"Tell me all," directed Clent.

He listened with increasing gravity, flinching at Mosca's terse account of her near-drowning, blinking impatiently at the inspiring tale of Saracen's bravery, snagging on Mistress Walty's unexpected cowardice, prodding at the weak places until Mosca had dredged the least details from her watery memories.

"Well," was his first pronouncement when she had finished. "Well, then. Perhaps, madam, the time has come for us to leave Mr. Beech to ply the city with his native charm?"

"We need the money, Mr. Clent."

"Sagaciously observed, though as to that, surely our residence here has been long enough for you to have formed purely hypothetical designs upon our hosts' strongboxes…? Perhaps…" He trailed off in response to a certain mulish shift in Mosca's countenance. "So that is how it is. You have grown accustomed to living in the lap of luxury? You would not give up our newfound comforts before the time comes? Or is it that you wish to see this election through to its conclusion? Professional pride will not permit you to leave the work half-done – the Grand Old Firm of Mye and Clent soldiers on, heedless of assassins waiting in the wings?"

"This was your idea, wasn't it. Easy money for the taking. Seems to me it's working out just how you said."

"A small matter of attempted murder aside. Oh, very well. 'Tis a pity, is all. Beech's town hall this evening presents the ideal cover for two fugitives wishing to shimmer gracefully out of sight."

Mosca shrugged.

Clent sighed. "If you are not to be moved, then we ought to prepare ourselves for that very town hall. Is there nothing to be done about the state of your attire?"

Mosca got up and shook out her grimy skirt. "I'll see what I can do."

"And… perhaps…" Clent cleared his throat. "If you have a moment, you might rest your head? You have had quite the ordeal."

"I'm used to it," Mosca said shortly. With an embarrassed growl she added, "Got no time, anyways."

***

The town hall, where Beech would speak to the citizens of Corseul and open himself to their questions, was held in a theater owned by Beech himself. It was small and dark, and at the moment filled with smoke and packed so full of noise that the sounds were squeezed too close to tell apart from one another.

From the booth at one side of the stage, Mosca, her dress almost restored with the help of Beech's housekeeper, watched the crowd filling the theater's long benches.

The farmers in their rough jackets, worrying about getting the harvest started. The students in their dark gowns with their mortarboards in their laps or flapping in the air as they talked high-sounding nonsense. The residents of the Flats, grimly preparing their questions to Beech. The sour-faced Stationers, spleening about the election straining the University press's special dispensation. How many of them were here as observers only, and how many would cast their ballot in two weeks' time?

"But _who_ gets to choose, Mr. Clent?" Mosca had wondered during their trek to Corseul. "Seems to me it makes a big difference, if it's just the rich ones or if _everyone_ gets a say."

"Control yourself, Mosca," Clent had answered, amused. "We are not bound for Corseul to overthrow their system of government. As it happens, I believe any man who can prove he pays a property tax is entitled to vote."

Mosca had had some further questions and opinions, not all of them positive. But owners of property, in Corseul, had turned out to be a surprisingly broad category. To complicate things, a fair number of them were women. Women, of course, were not permitted to vote. But property owners they still were, and so it was an open secret that they delegated their votes to trustworthy male members of their households when the time came.

A cross section of women was represented at the town hall, as well as men, though the women filled the benches at the back. There were servants and housekeepers and fashionable wives and girls hardly older than Mosca, biding their time with knitting and embroidery and quiet talk. Based on past experience, Mosca knew they were saving their voices to use once the meeting got started.

At the back of the booth, Arvor Beech finished consulting with his elegant, smooth-faced wife, turned to an anxiously hovering Clent, and said a few inaudible words. The two men walked out onto the stage; Clent stayed to one side, and Beech took up position at the lectern set up at the center.

The furor subsided to bearable levels. Individual voices could now be heard sparking up. Beech, who was a broad, youngish man with round eyes, waved a hand over the crowd, as though bestowing a blessing.

"My friends, I am glad you could all make it! This is the largest and heartiest crowd I have seen yet! I will begin with some remarks upon the day, and then we will proceed to the questions."

The remarks upon the day were the latest speech Clent had written for him. Clent, standing aside, could be seen mouthing the words to himself with the utmost concentration, as if uttering a spell to keep Beech from stumbling. There was no need: Beech spoke well, given a script. But like everyone else, Mosca was waiting for the questions to start.

Clent had not had it quite right. True, she was enjoying the sense of stable ground under her feet, of having a job that people expected her to do well, but she knew the miseries of hunger and helplessness had only been outrun, not banished. Mosca was too wise to trust the illusion of safety. At any moment someone would stand up and announce that Mosca Mye and Eponymous Clent, who had been passing themselves off as decent, upstanding citizens, were in truth criminals of the meanest sort. It had happened too often, in too many depressing permutations, for Mosca not to see it coming.

No: what she was really staying for, what she had to see through if she could, was the election itself. If Mr. Beech did win, would Mr. Pontivy just hand over the reins of power? Without war, without bloodshed, let a passel of citizenry choose their own leader? Mosca did not believe in it, and in her rage at the naïve vision she was not sure whether she was waiting to see it triumph or fall.

As the speech wound to a close, Mosca made sure Saracen was comfortably installed on the floor of the booth with a handful of dried cherries before creeping out and along the crammed aisle to the back seats, where the women were readying their questions. She squeezed herself into a nearly imaginary sliver of space beside Mistress Walty.

Mistress Walty's focus on Beech promptly deepened to fascination.

"You left me," muttered Mosca.

Teeth clenched, Mistress Walty hissed, "Didn't sign on to fight."

"Seems to me you aren't the type to get scared off by fighting."

Several people were now hurling questions at Beech. Mosca sat very still, looking down at her hands twisting together in her lap. If she was wrong, Mistress Walty would be embarrassed, maybe angry, and that was it. But if she was right…

"Who are you working for, Mistress Walty?"

A sharp intake of breath. Mistress Walty's face crinkled into fury – or was it fear? – then, just as abruptly, opened into a dangerous smile. "That's for me to know and you to lose sleep over, Miss Mye. I'd look sharp, if I were you. There's about to be something worth seeing."

Not for a moment did Mosca consider Mistress Walty might be bluffing – she was not so much menacing as prophetic. Mosca elbowed her way back into the aisle, then to the back of the room, where there was some hope of getting a view without too many heads in the way. Her eyes bounced around the assembly room like marbles on a tilting table. Was there anything out of place? Anyone acting strangely?

There. A man pressed against the wall, close to the stage. Hand inside his coat, watching Beech's every twitch.

And under his coat – the outline of a pistol. Mosca was sure of it.

_Don't panic now, just figure it out…_

Someone was trying to take out her means of escape. Someone supporting Pontivy, which meant someone who was an enemy of Mandelion. Someone trying to foil Mosca's hard work. _Someone_ who was going to be very, very disappointed if Mosca Mye had anything to do with it.

Without looking back to see if Mistress Walty had noted her revelation, Mosca crept back towards the front of the room along the opposite aisle from the man with the pistol, keeping him at the corner of her vision.

A pink bonnet. The man still standing, still watching. A whole crowd of students, on their feet and shouting, then another glimpse of that motionless form against the wall. A very large man in a very new coat, heavily perfumed. A brief vision of someone jostling the assassin's elbow. She was almost there now…

The last obstacle was the handful of Stationers, who had stood up and sidled forward to put their questions to Mr. Beech close up. Mosca ducked under the outstretched, delaiming arm of short, red-faced Mr. Frets, the head Stationer. And then –

The hand was sliding out of the coat, and through the smoke-filled air the pistol in it gleamed.

Mosca leapt the last few steps, shouting as she went. "Down, Mr. Beech, all of you, down! He's going to shoot!"

She rushed against the edge of the stage hard enough to knock the air out of her. From the confused commotion, the voices repeating her words, she knew she had done some good. She clambered onto the stage, found Beech beginning uncertainly to crouch, and yanked hard on the hem of his frockcoat. The candidate sank down beside her ungracefully, both of them obscured by the lectern.

"What in – " he started. "Why – "

Mosca jerked a thumb towards the assassin, who was shoving people out of his path with the help of a baton-wielding associate who had materialized out of the crowd. The gunman slid into a smooth stance and raised his pistol. He did not pause for a moment over the empty space where Beech had just been. He was aiming for the edge of the stage closest to him where –

_Oh, no._

"Mr. Clent!" Mosca bellowed, heart leaping to her throat.

– where Eponymous Clent was doing his best both to see what was happening and to keep well out of it.

Mosca's shout came just as the pistol fired.

A meaningless scrap of thought flew through Mosca's head: _How come it's so quiet all of a sudden?_

The man had been so close to that end of the stage that it was for a moment obscured by smoke.

Close enough not to miss his target, surely.

Mosca flowed to her feet. "Grab them!" she ordered, flinging out an arm towards the shooter and his accomplice. They disappeared behind a press of bodies. Mosca herself was darting across the stage to where Clent had fallen. Saracen passed her going in the other direction, wings fully extended, the commotion having drawn him out of his spot in the booth. Mosca would have to see about that shortly.

Clent was sprawled out on the rough boards of the stage with a surprised, foolish look blurring his face. His wig had been knocked askew, and sweat pearled his forehead. He was breathing hard. His right hand was pressed to his left shoulder. When Mosca dropped to her knees next to him, he looked her full in the face and murmured, "How extraordinary."

"Mr. Clent, are you… hurt?" asked Mosca, turning her head away as if to let his answer glance off her.

"It really is the most extraordinary thing…" As he spoke he was rapidly recovering his composure. Mosca risked looking back at him, and found him watching her narrowly. "You know, Mosca, I looked straight into that man's eyes as he took the shot. I could read his thoughts clearly: I am grim Death come among you, inexorable. But there – " A pause to lend a knowing look to the sudden chorus of screams punctuated by honking. " – his weapon betrayed him. The costliest guns are still fickle servants." He pried his hand from his shoulder. The sleeve of his coat was torn, and there was a scrape on his shoulder that had left a small trail of blood on his palm. "Though I am half-deafened, I find that I am, by and large, otherwise unscathed."

Mosca put a fist to her mouth and breathed out gustily. "Puffed up prattling puddin'head," she huffed. "Right. Stay there and don't get into any more trouble. I got things to attend to."

" _I_ get into trouble? Madam, I cannot believe you so dead to all notions of fairness as to blame…"

From there his monologue proceeded without the benefit of an audience.

***

"Plainly this sleeve was not stitched by the deftest needle in the land, but we make do with what we must." Clent displayed his repaired coat with a dismayed pout.

"At least we're not stitching you, Mr. Clent."

"Thank you, Mosca. Have you any further reflections to offer concerning my mortality and the recent near approach thereof?"

Mosca had not had time to do any reflecting.

The gunman's accomplice had been brought down – backed into a corner by Saracen and the student volunteer Tripe, who had formed a momentary alliance with the winged avenger. The gunman himself had escaped in the confusion caused by would-be captors attempting to avoid death by waterfowl. The accomplice had offered no answers concerning the pair's motives or employers, and he had been left to languish in a city prison.

Clent had been swept off by enthusiastic students, who had apparently wanted only the sight of violence to be converted heart and soul to Beech's cause. Mosca, feeling peevish and wrung out, had allowed old Professor Kittiwake to walk her back to her lodgings in Beech's house, staving off his attempts at grandfatherly kindness with stories of Mandelion.

"But in earnest, now." Clent shrugged the coat on to display his earnestness. "Let us indeed reflect. Your Mistress Walty – is she employed by Pontivy, or is she a minion of our most dogged pursuers?"

"She doesn't wear gloves," Mosca offered.

"Immaterial. She may serve in the same extraordinary capacity we ourselves have recently… moved on from."

"If it is _them_ …" Mosca started. "If it is the Locksmiths, Mr. Clent, why don't they nab us straight out? Either they're taking an interest in the election, or they want it looking that way."

"Keep our flouting of their authority under wraps? Let me go down as a casualty of politics rather than having it revealed we defied them for months?"

Mosca nodded slowly. Clent had spun out her wooly thoughts exactly. "And let everyone see it's dangerous to be caught supporting Mr. Beech."

"Then I would once again like to raise the possibility of – "

"No."

Mosca's determination to stay had somehow only grown in the wake of last night's events.

"Child." There's was a note of pleading in his voice. "I was nearly killed. You, by your own account, escaped a watery and ignoble grave by the tips of your beaked shadow's flight feathers. How can you persist in your single-minded adherence to a position rapidly outliving its benefit to us?"

"Mr. Beech'll pay us more if he sees us sticking it out even under threat to life and limb. Think about it – we would have enough to leave, and leftover to get settled."

"As usual I must remind you that even a king's ransom is no good to a pair of corpses."

"Well, I'm staying, and that's that, and if you try leaving without me, I'll – I'll – "

"You'll – what?" Clent asked softly. "Sell me out to the Locksmiths? Publish my crimes through your network of gossips? Have me tarred and feathered?"

Mosca pressed her lips into a thin line. _Why not let him go?_ she thought. _I could do this without him. People listen to me here…_ All she said was, "'Course not."

"I did not think so." Clent dropped his eyes demurely, as though Mosca had committed an indiscretion. "Have it your own way, madam – we stay to see this through. But I hope you have a most cunning plan for keeping us alive in the meantime."

"I have…" Mosca was struggling with the burst of illumination that had just come over her. "… _a_ plan, could be."

"You ease my mind. I have been reflecting, Mosca, and I recall that I did not precisely react well to the discovery that we were _betraying the Locksmiths_ to act as agents of Mandelion…"

"You threatened to roast Saracen," Mosca reminded him. "At length."

"Ah. Er, as I said, it was not my finest hour. Mortal terror does that to a person." Clent picked up a glass paperweight in the shape of an owl and became deeply engrossed in it. "However, taking all our near misses and our present peril into consideration…" A brief flicker of a glance up at Mosca. The paperweight turned over and over. "I do not think I could have borne the Locksmith boot upon my neck this long without a higher goal in sight. You did well, child."

Mosca could not imagine what had driven him to make such an admission. Surely a brush with death could not have shaken Eponymous Clent so profoundly.

Finally, she settled for saying, "I know I did," in the careful voice of one speaking to an invalid.

Before she could steer the conversation back towards her nascent plan, a knock came at their open office door. Arvor Beech and his wife, Brambleberry, came in. There was hardly room for them in the office. Clent dropped the paperweight and let his features melt into the eager, slightly wistful face he had crafted for Beech's benefit.

"Ah, come in, come and welcome!"

"Mr. Clent, you will forgive me for leaving this visit so long." Beech's eyes shone. "I have been overseeing the neighborhood breakfast and comedy act you advised me to host. I think it went rather well! There's so much sympathy after last night's, er, unpleasantness. Why, I was approached by no less than a dozen people hoping to volunteer their time to the campaign! Can you imagine?" In person, off the stage, Beech had a giddy, boyish manner that got up Mosca's nose. Arvor was a name that belonged to Goodlady Foamsprit, She Who Daubs the Waves with Moonlight. A playful Beloved. Arvor Beech was not just playful. He was, one might have said, effervescent. Under the right circumstances, one might have said so satisfying a word with a great deal of malice, in fact.

"Glad to hear it, Mr. Beech, and I hope you sent 'em my way." Mosca's drawl was barely friendly. "Now, how can we help you?"

"Ah, yes. Hm." Beech did not seem to know what to make of Mosca and moved on to something he understood better. "Mr. Clent, I wish to express my sincere horror at putting you in the line of fire last night. Beloved be thanked that nothing worse came of it than a panic. Of course I will understand if you choose to bow out of my campaign for the sake of your health…"

"Wound me not with these base accusations, I pray!" Clent's manner was at its grandest and most cloying. "Eponymous Clent, Upholder of Democracy, run in terror at the first sign of danger? Nay! I welcome danger. Let these villains do their worst. If the humble citizens of Corseul have seen this attempt as a call to arms, how much more shall the longing for just and honest rule that burns in their veins be inflamed if they should see me dead in the cause?"

He went on in this way for some time. Beech's eyes glazed with admiration. Clent seemed have called the sun down out of the sky to gleam upon his complete, lucid sincerity – even Mosca half-believed him, while he went on speaking.

When Clent had concluded with an almost tearful account of the legacy he meant to leave upon his eventual martyrdom, Beech exclaimed, "That's just what I wanted to hear!" and clapped him on the shoulder.

"But I hope," Brambleberry Beech added, "that it will not come to that. I pray you may live to be rewarded for your dedication to my husband's, and our city's, cause." Mistress Beech had a smile as sun-touched and lucid as Clent's, and it made Mosca wonder what was behind it.

Mistress Brambleberry Beech was, in any case, an object of interest to Mosca. She was the source of her husband's money, and, it had been whispered, his political ideals. She had come to Corseul from Mandelion a decade ago, an orphan of the Years of the Birdcatchers and the heiress of a tradesman's fortune. She had begun by purchasing lucrative tracts of land around the city, continued with sizeable donations to the University, and ended by marrying a student of dwindling means and no pedigree. Mosca had yet to catch Mistress Beech in the act of being political, or anything but studiedly ladylike – but her bland slipperiness itself told Mosca that she was simply not looking hard enough.

After a suitable period had passed, Clent steered the conversation down a fresh path. "Perhaps it is time to reconsider our approach. Pontivy has not scrupled to bring to bear the most dastardly, snake-hearted tactics at his disposal. The town urchins we have, ah, taken temporarily under our wing in exchange for keeping an ear to the ground report Pontivy has some new gruesomeness in mind for Election Day. It would behoove us – "

Beech no longer heard him. "It is a shameful thing!" he cried. "Simply shameful! There is no place in politics for that low, hideous…" He shook his head, mouthing in silent anger. Without Clent transmuting his sentiments into sentences, Beech often found himself choked by them.

"To be sure," murmured Clent. Mosca hoped she was the only one who caught the slight narrowing of his eyes. "A clean campaign it shall remain, on our side. We win this honestly, or not at all."

Beech beamed at him. "I knew you would understand, Mr. Clent."

And Brambleberry Beech? Had her eye flickered towards Mosca? Had her brow lifted just a hair? Mosca blinked steadily back at her. A signal open to interpretation.

***

In the middle of a busy afternoon, when the members of Beech's staff and household were moving to and fro like figures in a complicated clockwork, a storm of dispute was heard building in Clent and Mosca's office. Soon the storm had grown too large to be contained in so small a room. Out it spilled, dampening the clockwork as heads tilted to listen. Mosca and Clent were carried into the hall, giving their words space to unfold.

The argument was tremendous.

Though few among the listeners could parse all that was screamed, it seemed clear that the topic was, on one side, Clent's dissatisfaction with, in order, his partnership with Mosca, her overbearing ways, and the expectation that he would lay down his life for a politician. One the other side, Mosca spat upon Clent's pusillanimity, his jealousy of her success, and his snatching up of credit rightly due her.

The gale of heightened feeling blew them out into the courtyard. Every window and doorway filled with observers. All work ceased.

Maids and messenger boys wondered if they were condemning their souls merely by hearing such words brought out into the fresh air, but listened anyway with rapt attention. Beech, pulled along to the courtyard by an irresistible tide, hung about helplessly as his tickets to victory gouged strips out of each other before his eyes.

"I absolve myself of this poxy, starry-eyed ruse!" Clent yelled. "From this day forth all my energy shall be turned to unseating you from your place of pride, demon child!"

"Go on then!" Mosca shrieked back. "We don't need a lily-livered, cheese-brained, chirfugging traitor anyways! Go see if that grinning rat Mr. Pontivy has any use for you!"

"That may be the best idea you have ever had!" Clent wheezed. There had been a great deal of shouting already. With these final words, he turned on his heel and exited the courtyard, scattering passerby who had stopped at the open gate back to their errands.

Mosca stood heaving and glaring after him. She was red-faced and trembling all over. At the nearest gawker she growled, "And what are _you_ looking at?"

"N-nothing, miss, nothing at all." The unlucky footman retreated. So did everyone else. No one wanted to be in Mosca's way just now, not with the waves of fury still rolling off her and the fumes of hair-raising oaths thickening the air around her.

***

Back in the office that was now hers alone, Mosca slammed the door, hopped cross-legged up onto the desk that Saracen in her absence had unceremoniously cleared of everything but the varnish, and slumped with her knuckles kneading her cheeks.

"Think we sold it, Saracen?" she asked hoarsely.

Saracen, from the floor, made a thoughtful, gravelly noise.

"Yeah, it was a bit much. It's hard pretending to be angry without working yourself up. I might have hurt Mr. Clent's feelings for real." She gave a small, punch-drunk laugh.

Saracen could not have expressed his indifference to Clent's feelings more eloquently with a printed, bound, and gold-stamped treatise.

Mosca looked around at the chaos on the floor. Saracen was not the only person she knew who could cause a disproportionate amount of trouble. Then she grinned. "Mr. Pontivy won't know what hit 'im."

***

Escrow Pontivy at that moment sat behind his immense carved desk in his enormous oak-paneled office in the hulking house of red bricks that his great-grandfather had had delivered to Corseul at staggering expense. Being a careful and far-sighted man, Mr. Pontivy's great-grandfather had laid in a store of bricks sufficient to last through half a dozen renewals of the imposing façade, and the front of the house was as bright and clean now as it had been when it was first built.

Escrow Pontivy had drunk his afternoon tea, and he had eaten his afternoon half a roll with a dab of butter. An expensive traveling physician had advised him several years ago to eat only one heavy meal a day, and Pontivy, out of a weakness for bacon, had chosen breakfast. Over time he had come to eat less and less at other meals, especially when he was stressed. He was very stressed now.

It was this election that was doing it: he could not understand it. There had never been any trouble about getting elected before. All his previous opponents had been men he dealt with in his business, who owed money to him. Of course there had been no real chance for any of them to be chosen over him. This Arvor Beech was nobody from nowhere, of no talent or distinction, thrust upon the public by his busybody wife's wealth. Now this Beech was the chosen of that public. How could it be?

There were also Pontivy's new advisors. He appreciated their help, of course, but they made him nervous. Not half an hour ago a thin-faced, terribly urbane man wearing beautiful gloves had sat across from Pontivy and delivered his latest advice. The meeting had quite destroyed Pontivy's appetite. Still, it seemed there was a way for him to win, after all.

Pontivy was just beginning to settle his work when his exceptionally refined manservant, trained in the Capital, appeared in the room. "Sir," he said, "there is a Mr. Eponymous Clent, Election Advisor, desirous of speaking with you."

"Clent?" repeated Pontivy. That name was all too familiar to him. "One of Beech's catspaws? Whatever does he want?"

"He is seeking employment, sir," said the manservant, whose name was Daunt. Mr. Daunt was in an excellent mood just now: Eponymous Clent had offered him a quick game of cards and had handily lost a sum that would keep Mr. Daunt in gifts for his paramour for some time to come. He was prepared to plead Clent's case as necessary.

As it happened, Daunt's eloquence was not called upon. Mr. Pontivy had conceived a painful curiosity about Beech's election advisors. "Well, why are you keeping the man waiting, Daunt?" he said. "Bring him in, bring him in!"

"Very good, sir," said Daunt, and stepped out to carry the good news to Clent.

Before making Mr. Daunt's acquaintance, Clent had stood outside the house for some time. He had taken in its immense proportions and its clean bricks. He had compared its stately sequence of entrances and exits to the bustle he had recently left behind in Beech's house of local stone. He had watched a certain gentleman leave the house. And by the time he was at last shown into Pontivy's office, Eponymous Clent had formed a very shrewd idea of the kind of man he had to deal with: Escrow Pontivy would have a very narrow idea of how things ought to be, in relation to himself especially, and so long as external actors, Eponymous Clent included, behaved in a way that followed his preconceived notions, Pontivy would believe them.

Clent was quite confident in his conclusions. This was, after all, how he had made a competent living for years.

"My dear Mr. Pontivy," he began, approaching the desk, "you must allow me to throw myself upon your mercy."

"My man tells me you want a job," said Pontivy, rather faintly.

"Ah, yes, you see…" Clent glanced at the chair before Pontivy's desk but visibly chose to remain standing, as befitted his penitent position. "Coming as a stranger to your jewel of a city I had no idea of the situation I found here. I am culpable, most culpable, of course, for failing to appreciate your position at once. But now that I have broken with my wholly unsuitable associates, I come here to offer my humble services to assist you however I may in retaining your rightful place as mayor of this city and vanquishing an opponent it is hardly fair to ask you to acknowledge."

Pontivy had been prepared to be impressed. In the event, he was overawed. He offered full forgiveness to Clent for having temporarily aided the enemy camp. He promised that there would be no difficulty about finding Clent a position on his staff – he did not, Mr. Clent must understand, have anything so vulgar as a body dedicated to election activities, but to be sure there were suitable duties to be found, about Pontivy's business concerns if not touching the election.

Clent, pardoned and accepted, beamed.

With a last twinge of scruple, Pontivy just remembered to say he must consult his advisors as to precisely where Clent's abilities would be of most use.

"Naturally, my excellent Mr. Pontivy," said Clent. "I would be loath to proceed without the blessing of anyone worthy of your trust."

"Naturally, naturally," echoed Pontivy. "I shall call Daunt back in, so he can get you acquainted with the household, Mr. Clent."

Clent smiled, inwardly lamenting slightly that so little of his range had been called upon. Well, there was far more to Mosca's scheme than simply ingratiating himself with the incumbent. "I should be most gratified," he said.

"You do know how to make an impression," said Daunt moments later, leading Clent through the grand public rooms of the house, which were undergoing a thorough cleaning in preparation for upcoming festivities.

"It is a gift," Clent admitted. "Now, Daunt, my excellent fellow, I confess to a great curiosity about this master of yours. What kind of a man is he? What are his habits? He struck me, I must say, as being very particular."

"Oh, yes, Mr. Clent, that he is. The things I could tell you…"

And, very happily, Mr. Daunt unburdened himself of a great number of grievances against his employer. Within minutes he had induced several of the maids busy about the cleaning to do likewise. Through it all, Clent's plump features were alight with sympathy, and his keen mind with schemes.

***

With her own responsibilities and Clent's, and extra piled on top of that, Mosca hardly had time to breathe.

There were the speeches to write – she thought she was getting quite good at this by now – and the support of all the new University converts to consolidate and direct. Mosca was still working out her opinions on delegating tasks: on the one hand, it saved her doing them herself; on the other hand, even when she trusted the people she had assigned them to, she caught herself wasting a tremendous amount of energy wondering whether they were being done _right_. But by far her least favorite new duty was supporting the spirits bruised by Clent's apparent defection. Arvor Beech, who naturally could not be in on the secret, was particularly cast down, as a statue of a saint might be by the adherents of an opposing religion. Mosca tried to be patient and reassuring, and found him more annoying than ever.

"But… I trusted him," the perplexed candidate moaned, not for the first time. At his side, Mistress Beech watched Mosca from under her lashes, a look of benign tolerance on her face. "He seemed so… genuine. What will we do now?"

"There's nothing Mr. Clent could do I can't do twice as well with half the guff," Mosca told him firmly. "Now come along to the University – I've got my tame scholars to organize you a welcome committee."

Beech came along.

Mosca was sharpening her new firm, downright manner into a ready weapon. She had, in the aftermath off the town hall murder attempt, recalled the way everyone had jumped at her command to go after the assassins. Never before had obedience to her wishes been so quick and unbegrudging. Whenever she needed something done at once, she tried to recapture the feeling that had provoked her then. Mostly, she got there by remembering that Clent had walked into the enemy camp on her say so, out of faith, presumably, in her cunning plan.

"A novel notion of yours, sending me into the dragon's very jaws to keep me safe," he had said when she had explained the plan to him, but the balance of his criticism after that had been entirely constructive.

After delivering her candidate into the grasping arms of the students, Mosca went to touch off another avenue of her plan. She foresaw with concern a time when the plan would become too troublesome to navigate, and hoped to get a grasp on it with repetition, as she had done with the University campus. At first its haphazard scatter of ivy-grown, shot-scarred stone piles had turned her head. By now the landmarks had become old friends. She crossed from the central chapel to the campus's murkiest border with the rest of the city, Saracen's leash clutched tightly in her hand.

She caught the chatter around her as she went.

"...can't keep a pot of tea out without cold marsh water getting into it…"

"…furniture never quite where it's supposed to be, tripping people up…"

"…Pontivy raging 'cause the footmen's liveries smelled like mildew and put his guests off their dinner…"

"…chimneys smoking and choking and mucking up the expensive wallpaper…"

Mosca glowed with smug satisfaction. A couple of those were her ideas, but clearly Clent had been exercising his imagination – and ingratiating himself with Pontivy's staff, by the sound of it.

Along most of its perimeter, the University was raised above its neighbors upon the last bastion of high ground before the marsh and the sea took over. On the east side, the campus sloped languidly into streets of shops and inns and narrow houses. Mosca headed straight towards an inn called the Boiled Lobster. After a quick consultation with the landlord – secured with a promise that Saracen would not terrorize his customers – Mosca went through to a back room and announced her interest in one Juniper Walty, blacksmith's widow.

The five women in the room, one of whom was plainly Mistress Walty herself, stared at Mosca. Then the heads of the other four swiveled like the heads of mistimed marionettes to look at Mistress Walty. After a moment, they all looked carefully away.

"I'd like a word, is all." Mosca tried to look magnanimous. Her face was unsure of what to do with that direction. "I've been thinking we could come to an arrangement."

"You have my attention," said Mistress Walty icily. "Outside."

Mosca watched her narrowly: there was a flicker of ready panic, a cloud of fear trailing after Juniper Walty that Mosca recognized, uneasily, from having lived within it herself. She followed the not-so-merry widow out to a rubbish-choked back garden where a flower patch was resiliently growing a thicket of dandelions surrounded by clover over the bones of a one-time rosebush. Saracen eyed the clover with interest.

Mistress Walty planted her hands on her hips. "Speak your piece, then."

Mosca's conclusions, which up to this moment had appeared bathed in the light of truth, began to look rather dingy. Never mind, now. "Why don't you go ahead and tell me what the Locksmiths have on you?" she prompted, in her firm, downright voice.

Mistress Walty was very still, save for a light tremor beside one eye. Mosca wondered if the widow was about to hit her.

"Mr. Walty's debts, which he died incurring. He was a blacksmith in a… very technical sense. An illegal one. The Locksmiths… were not appreciative of his creative energies."

Mosca nodded. Something inside of her deflated. "Are they just spoiling for mine and Mr. Clent's blood, or is it over the election, too?"

"Listen, you patronizing, pointy-faced little witch…"

"All right," said Mosca impatiently, "so I'm all those things, and a Housefly, too, an' this Housefly can put you right with the Locksmiths." _I think I can, at least,_ Mosca thought. "Now what do you know?"

Juniper Walty's eyes searched Mosca suspiciously, and no wonder. After all, what was an angry scrap of girl against the most feared guild in the realm? But Mistress Walty must have found whatever she was looking for in Mosca's face.

She spoke in a distant, almost dreamy voice. "They're backing Escrow Pontivy, as you can imagine, but they're more interested in manufacturing a ruckus on Election Day to show how dangerous and radicalish the whole tradition is. You must have noticed no one's been heckled or harassed the last few days. That doesn't matter to them anymore. When it all blows up to the sky on Election Day, _they_ can sweep in, install Pontivy under their own auspices, and keep anyone else from getting notions about choosing their own leaders. You and your Mr. Clent are meant to suffer tragic accidents during the uproar." She lowered her lids, fixing Mosca with a sideways gaze. "His turning over to the other side hasn't changed their minds."

"Figures." Mosca had gone cold and small and wary inside. But they still had a plan. Now they just needed some more plan on top of that. "I got the picture. We have to keep the peace on Election Day and make sure there's a fair election. And we've got a week to work it all out."

"We?"

Mosca had no way of knowing whether the tremor in Mistress Walty's voice was hope or dread, and somewhere she felt a twist of guilt. "Might as well help now you've ratted out your keepers."

After a pause, Mistress Walty perked up just like a flower shown the light. "Show me the way."

Mosca's guilt became a dragging weight – she had convinced Mistress Walty to betray the Locksmiths; now she was responsible for her.

***

"Horrible, interfering woman," said Escrow Pontivy. "Just what are her antecedents, I ask you? Tradesmen, she says? Pitchfork-wielding farmers, _I_ say. She endowed this accursed scholarship and gave me a part in the pageantry out of spite, I know it."

Pontivy did not specify what cause Brambleberry Beech might have for spite. Clent, though he had been given no cause to think charitably of the lady, suspected there was a good one.

"It is a dreadful thing, indeed, the way sufficient money can bring anyone up in the world, whatever their… antecedents." Clent delivered this plausibly deniable reference to Pontivy's own less than blue-blooded great-grandfather in a distracted murmur. He and Pontivy had just arrived in the University's great assembly chamber, where Mistress Beech's scholarship would be awarded with great pomp to one lucky student. The rigid, academic splendor of the room with its soaring windows and severe rows of wooden benches made a focus for the gilded, garland-bedecked table at the very front of it, where Mistress Beech herself presided. Leaning her crossed arms on the back of the equally gilded chair next to her was Mosca Mye.

Clent wondered what the justification for Mosca's presence was. He himself owed the interruption to his routine to Pontivy's expressed preference for Clent's company; Clent suspected, though, that someone had dropped a hint to Pontivy to keep his new employee close at hand.

Pontivy shed Clent's company at the frontmost row of benches and joined Mistress Beech at the table, where they met with every symptom of outward graciousness and inward loathing. Mistress Beech tapped the table beside her meaningfully, and Mosca dropped into the chair, re-crossing her arms and staring out into the audience as though she could drink in their thoughts through her gaze.

The event proceeded mannerfully enough. There was a series of speeches by more or less boring dignitaries. Then it was Mistress Beech's turn. Standing in the gap between the table and the audience, she spoke shamelessly of her devotion to the University's ideals and of the respect with which her husband had always regarded them. Then her voice dropped. The chamber carried it effortlessly to all the listening ears.

"The true visionaries, the men of pure heart, always find enemies enough," she intoned. "You all know that only days back there was a most cowardly, a most appalling attempt made on my husband's life. Yes, though it pains me even to remember it, my own wonderful Mr. Beech was nearly killed – murdered! – for daring to bare his beautiful soul on the political stage." She paused – a vibrating pause, in which it was clear the lady was valiantly holding back her tears before going on.

Clent seethed for a moment. Then, briefly, he caught Mosca's eye. She shrugged fractionally, and the corner of her mouth tilted up; for all anyone else had seen, she might have merely been lost in admiration for Brambleberry's rhetorical prowess. Clent understood from her gestures that there had been a deliberate decision made, by one Mosca Mye, to shift the narrative touching the assassination attempt. And come to that, Clent approved, however it stung his self-importance: it was _better_ for Beech to have been the target.

He wondered how Mosca and Mistress Beech had come to this understanding. He wondered also how they planned to make the story stick, when there had been witnesses enough to the true events.

Pontivy, from his seat beside Mistress Beech's empty one, watched her with a wide-eyed, hypnotized expression. He could not have failed to note, any more than Clent or anyone else present, that Mistress Beech gracefully avoided any reference to the identities of Arvor Beech's enemies. When her speech was over, Pontivy, cast without a single direct word spoken against him as the University's oppressor, had to stand up and present the award.

To do him credit, he carried it off with dignity. But the damage had been done. You heard it in the quality of the applause when he had spoken: the timing was wrong, and also the rhythm.

Afterwards, the assembly was dismissed and spilled out into the University's central court. Brambleberry Beech sailed among the crowd, upright and elegant, dipping here and there into earnest speech with this or that group of students and faculty – the influential ones, no doubt. Mosca dangled along in Mistress Beech's wake like a kite on a windless day. Clent maneuvered towards her through the throng.

"How can even your low nature not revolt to hear such a pack of lies as that woman just treated us to?" he declaimed, loud enough to be heard by the surrounding crowd. "As if anyone cared for your pitiful candidate enough to wish to put a bullet in him!"

Mosca froze, then snapped into action at once. "Pitiful? What's pitiful is you still tryin' to make it out like those assassins wanted you, when everyone knows you aren't important enough. Haven't you had your fill of sabotaging Mr. Beech?" And she shoved angrily past Clent.

"One day you will get yours, depend upon it," he called after her.

She turned and gave him a glare sure to convince anyone watching that their falling out was no act.

Clent retreated slowly to the outskirts of the crowd, willing himself not to reach into his coat pocket to pull out the note he knew would be there – the note he had watched Mosca hastily scrawl while all other eyes were riveted on Mistress Beech's performance.

"That was neatly done," came the low voice of Mistress Beech. "You've got that girl nicely trained up."

Clent had jumped at the first note of her voice and was doing his best recover from it. "I have no idea what you mean, my good lady," he said.

"No?" Her gentle amusement wafted over him like cloying perfume. They had ended up beneath an enormous ceremonial oak growing at one end of the court. The afternoon sun had lowered enough to wrap all that fell in the tree's great shadow in premature twilight. At this distance, with the noise of the crowd, it was just possible to have a twilight sort of conversation.

Clent, sloughing off a layer or so of pretense, said, "You have done remarkably well for yourself here, Mistress Beech. I wonder if you were ever truly in Mandelion, as they say?"

"Oh, they say many things." In the gloom, Mistress Beech's smile grew just a touch wider and sharper than her public face allowed. "And I did come from Mandelion – though as a gentleman of your profession will have surmised, I didn't have my fortune at the time. No matter – it was real enough when I got here."

"You amaze me," said Clent coldly.

"None of that sarcasm with me. After all, I have been keeping a close eye on little Miss Mye." The apparent non sequitur could not have been more pointed.

Clent, looking away with all the appearance of disinterest he could muster, said, "I am not surprised. She is doing all she can to advance _your husband's_ ambitions."

Mistress Beech laughed softly. "Point granted. And Miss Mye will keep healthy so long as she does advance those ambitions, never you fear. I am so glad we have had a chance to speak privately, Mr. Clent. Under my husband's roof, you know…"

"I am most gratified that you have seen fit to open your mind to me, even so small a chink, Mistress Beech. Good day."

With a suppressed shudder Clent left her under the tree. The shudder was one of purest envy: Brambleberry Beech was the most successful crook he had ever encountered. Why, she had disappeared into her respectable and legally sanctioned public life so completely that he had never heard a word of her. And she must have cut quite a swathe across the country in her time.

Small wonder she should feel threatened by associating with less ascended crooks of the likes of Mosca and Clent.

Clent paused before rejoining Pontivy, though he could see the mayor looking around impatiently for him. Another figure had caught his eye.

From the edge of the crowd, a white-faced man in rich clothing was watching Pontivy with calculating eyes. This very same gentleman had ruined Pontivy's appetite and had been seen by Clent leaving the red-brick house. When he had watched Clent rejoin Pontivy, he nodded faintly to himself and left the court by a dim alley.

***

"Tor Cantharel. Champion lurker, tormentor of dashing widows, overzealous devotee of fashion, and, of especial relevance to us, the head of Corseul's Locksmiths. A typical specimen as far as that body of men goes. Perhaps a few vices to exploit, by the look of him. What do you say, madam?"

Mosca had watched the burgundy velvet back disappear into the doorway of the shipping company's offices next door to the stupefyingly noisy, hideously dark inn where she and Clent were meeting. A single ring of candles hung up among the rafters, its four thin candles seeming to leech light rather than shed it. Just about everybody in the vicinity of the docks seemed to be crammed into the small space, an impression heightened by the surprising lack of activity on the portside street. Mosca had balked at first at airing their private plans in such a public place, but though it was public it also so thick with noise that they might as well have been holding their conference on the moon for all anyone could hear them.

Before Mosca had arrived, Clent had, by unknown arts, secured a tiny table beside the only window in the place. It was a small, grimy window, letting in only a fraction of the light of a dismally gray day, but Mosca was glad of it. It also, conveniently, offered an edge-on view of the building Cantharel had gone into.

"He don't look like much. Expensive and overbred," she diagnosed, when Cantharel had reappeared behind the far more plentiful windows of that building. "How'd you know where to find him, Mr. Clent?"

"First," began Clent, "you must understand that I have been busy carrying out your artfully delivered instructions and listening for hints of Locksmith plots. Cantharel came to see Pontivy not long after we returned from the ceremony. My sympathetic new friends in the Pontivy household were able to introduce me to a ready-made series of spyholes riddling the mansion."

Clent's new friends were everywhere, from the maid who had brought his message early this morning to the old drunk who had directed Mosca to the Salted Cod when she came to keep the appointment. Mosca was impatient to hear what he had learned, as the brief message had been deeply intriguing, but she had, she grudgingly admitted to herself, missed listening to his discursive tales.

"I was thus enabled to take Cantharel's measure and to overhear – yes – much that is of interest to us. The man's image moreover was graven upon my eye. Yet it almost passed my belief when, arriving by the docks earlier, his was nearly the first face I spotted! Of course I followed him, at a careful distance, and heard him announcing his plans at the door of that establishment. I was delighted to find this inn conveniently placed to watch him, and as obscure and anonymous a spot as a pair of conspirators could wish. Naturally I had the excellent Mr. Sturgeon conduct you here when you arrived."

"So you got lucky," Mosca summarized. "But if you didn't know he'd be here, how come we ended up meeting by the docks?"

"Ah," said Clent, "well spotted. That is because I had another piece of business to transact. I have spoken to the captain of one of those fine vessels – " The window was momentarily darkened by a gesture no less grand for being mostly invisible to Mosca. " – a worthy fellow, by the way, full of opinions about the state of docking fees and customs duties – and I booked us passage on his excellent ship. Yes, Mosca," he added indulgently at her sharp intake of breath, "the conclusion of this adventure draws near, and our exit must be sure."

The conclusion of the adventure… Mosca had been painfully excited about the prospect of visiting the docks, where at last she would glimpse the sea, but on the way out to the barrier island a superstitious conviction had seized her that to see it now would be to doom their escape. That conviction had not prevented her feeling wildly disappointed at the thick, warm fog wrapping the entire island. Only the ships moored closest in were visible, pale hulks in the mist, the tops of their masts ghostly.

All the same, she was relieved to know that their passage was booked.

"Have you worked yourself up to telling me what you found out yet?" she asked.

"Presently, child, presently. You understand I was taking time away from my work. Mr. Pontivy has seen fit to allow me to represent him in a few small business interests, and to reconcile his accounts."

"He never," said Mosca, her voice fading into a disbelieving hiccup of laughter.

"I give you my oath."

"But, Mr. Clent, that's practically asking you to steal from him."

"Oh, I know." Clent's voice left no doubt as to the greedy visions of wealth he was entertaining. Mosca's thoughts were taking a somewhat different turn, but there would be time to address that difference of vision later.

"That's all very well," she said, "but you've got off track. What did Mr. Cantharel say?"

Without further pomp, Clent answered: "When the Election Day festivities are nearing their end, the Locksmiths and their chosen candidate plan to announce that the ballots have been tampered with, the result are not to be trusted, and Beech is a criminal. They will, per Mr. Cantharel, have ample evidence prepared to support their claims."

"And people will just believe that? Bleedin' good evidence it'd have to be."

"They may not need to believe it to do violence over it, Mosca. Our own side – your own side, I should say – has just had its passions raised to fever pitch by the good lady Brambleberry's graces. The accusation of wrongdoing against Beech will be sufficient to touch off the explosion."

Mosca was forced to acknowledge the likelihood of such an occurrence. "We'll have to make it out so the results are too sure for anyone to claim they've been fixed without looking like a desperate fool. But no one in either campaign is allowed anywhere near the ballots. I've already got my pet rhetoric students looking into election laws for things like that. And," she went on, the first glimmer of an idea starting in her mind, "I can set them to work with their books to see if we can't maybe tie the Locksmiths into knots with legal talk so they don't even have time to make their announcement."

"I would not count on it."

"Well, let's hear your pearls of wisdom, then," Mosca snapped.

"I confess that your shadow of an idea is better than anything I have yet been able to hit upon. I humbly apologize," sounding anything but humble or apologetic, "for aspersions cast and wish you the best of luck leashing the law to your will."

"But you don't think it'll work."

"Who knows?" said Clent with a mournful sigh. Then, tone sharpening: "Perhaps you ought to consult Mistress Beech – you seem to have included her in our schemes already."

Mosca felt the mixture of deep apprehension and passionate interest that always accompanied the thought of Brambleberry Beech. Shifting uncomfortably on her stool, she said, "That's to say she's included herself in them, without me seeing how to keep her out. She knew our fight was staged, right off – I figured it wouldn't turn her round. She asked if there was any little story she could spin for me at that ceremony yesterday, and, see, I'd been thinking, Mr. Clent, that it's less likely anyone'll take another shot at you if we make you out to be unimportant…"

"Why, Mosca, I am touched by your concern." And the wonder was he did sound touched. After a moment's silence, during which Mosca studiously pressed closer to the window to keep an eye on the flapping edge of Cantharel's sleeve, Clent continued. "And on the subject of personal safety, I might just whisper a word of caution into your ear, madam, concerning that Mistress Beech. She is _not_ , in my professional evaluation, a nice person to know."

"You mean she's crooked."

"Ingeniously, nay, dangerously so."

"So are we," said Mosca, "when you get down to it."

Clent gave a dry laugh with no joy in it. "What a thing to say, child."

"It's the truth. And I've guessed about Mistress Beech by now, you must know I have, Mr. Clent. She keeps talking at me without really saying anything, and when I try to get anything out of her she just smiles and melts away like morning frost."

"I suppose I can trust you to exercise all due caution, at that. The subject is only foremost in my mind because I had an illuminating interview with the lady yesterday."

But Mosca did not hear then how Clent's interview had gone. She grabbed his wrist unerringly despite the darkness and gestured frantically out the window with the other hand. Cantharel of the Locksmiths had left the shipping company's offices and was headed straight for the Salted Cod. As he approached, a figure separated itself from the darkness of the narrow alley between the two buildings and joined Cantharel, plucking his sleeve and grinning obsequiously. Mosca saw Cantharel's shoulders come up stiffly. His hat dipped as he nodded to the man.

"There a back way out of here, Mr. Clent?" asked Mosca. She had no doubt Clent had investigated the public house thoroughly.

Sure enough, the answer came: "Indeed there is."

"Good. Go out that way. Now. I'll send word by Wend the bootblack."

Clent's eyes flashed faintly in the dark. He picked up the glasses of ale they had been pretending to drink and then he was off, squeezing past the crowded tables and quickly vanishing into the dark. Mosca just had time to slide under the table and fold herself up close against the wall below the windowsill before the door opened. The patrons cried out as even the meager light of that gray day stung their gloom-accustomed eyes. The cursing continued, albeit hesitantly, as Cantharel and his hanger-on pushed their way to the lone empty table. The cursing had an undercurrent of fear, and when the talk resumed it was not as loud as it had been: Cantharel was known.

Mosca had yet to see his face close up, but his thin, precise voice sounded just as she had imagined it.

"Cursed to see the filth as well as roll around in it," he complained, lowering himself onto Mosca's recently vacated stool. Two boots smelling of new leather overlaid with fish guts appeared under the table. From the other side came workman's shoes, smelling considerably worse.

"So?" Smelly shoes had an eager, nasal voice. "You mentioned a job for a willing body, sir?"

The thin voice sliced through the dense clamor of the inn: "Have you any political opinions, Hasp?"

"Depends. Am I getting paid to have them?"

"Oh, yes. As of now you are a devoted supporter of the people's darling, Arvor Beech. The people do get stirred up about these things. So when Election Day comes along you will understandably be fearful that Escrow Pontivy may stamp upon the people's will and refuse to step aside in the event of Beech's victory."

"And being that fearful and stirred up, I'd want to make some noise and stir my brother supporters," the eager Hasp filled in. "That's an idea, that."

"Is it not? How do you feel about it, Hasp? You know I can make it well worth your while."

"You'll get your money's worth of blood from me, Mr. Cantharel, count on it."

"Good." After a pause, Cantharel said, "Well, go on, what are you still sitting here for? Send in the next one. I have other places to be today."

The smelly shoes were removed and soon replaced by a pair of fisherman's boots. Again Cantharel asked, "Have you any political opinions?"

Mosca heard the same small drama played out four more times. Not all Cantharel's interlocutors were as quick on the uptake as Hasp, but once they had the picture they were all just as eager for money and bloodshed. Mosca's thoughts raced. When Cantharel dismissed his final candidate of the session and vacated the premises, she waited only a minute before stumbling out into the street.

She did not look to see which way Cantharel had gone. She simply pelted breathlessly down the barrier island's single street, lined on one side with buildings and on the other mostly open to the docks. There was not enough of a crowd to hide her, if Cantharel happened to be looking, though perhaps the disguise of her old ragged dress would be enough to put him off. At any rate, she did not stop running until she reached the end of the street, where it met the causeway that ran over the marshes and linked the port to the mainland.

Mosca vaulted over the low seawall by the side of the road and stumbled down a raggedly grassy slope to the very edge of the gray water, where she folded into a crouch.

So that was the other part of the plan: Locksmith plants to stir suspicion among Beech's supporters and goad them into open violence. With a cold corner of her mind, Mosca admired how neatly all Cantharel's strategies relied on the enthusiasm Mosca and her confederates had fostered among Beech's supporters, using it as a lever to vault Corseul into chaos.

Mosca had an idea about how she might fight this latest strategy, or at least she would have an idea, once the jumble in her brain settled. As she tried to clear her mind, out on the water, a small sloop emerged from the fog bank. It must have been headed towards the docks, which Mosca could hardly see anymore past the hump of the island. Its sailors sang a deep, rolling song that came to her over the water and held her in place. After a few minutes the fog swallowed the ship once more, but the song lingered after.

When even the last echoes had faded, Mosca got up, climbed back over the seawall, and set out along the causeway. Segments of it nearer to the city, which were sinking into the marsh, were propped up by hasty and unreassuring piles, and anyone driving a cart went very carefully. Out here the causeway could still be trusted.

This close to the port, the air smelled of coal smoke and fish and refuse, with just a note of brine underlying all, more of a rasp at the back of your throat than a smell. Mosca wondered whether the smell that came over the marshes and stirred the sea-longing in her was truly the smell of the ocean, or whether it was only what was left once the air had passed through the barrier island like a sieve.

After a few minutes' walking, Mosca was hailed by a cart headed towards the city, driven by a short, square woman: Beech's housekeeper, who insisted on going by the single name of Bulge. She had taken Mosca out to the port and now, returning from her shopping expedition, she was ready to take Mosca back to the city. The footman who had come with her gave Mosca a hand getting into the back of the cart. Saracen, who had been left in the cart for the duration of the visit, waddled curiously over to her.

"All go right with your secret business, miss?" asked Bulge.

"Swell," answered Mosca.

***

If there was one thing about Arvor Beech that Mosca appreciated, apart from his money, it was the way he could make anything sound simple and obvious with that earnest, puppylike manner of his. Give him a script and put him up on a stage, and you were golden. Mosca wondered if Mistress Beech had picked him out to marry for just that quality.

Strictly speaking, he was not up on a stage at the moment. He was sitting up on a table at one of the most reputable inns in Corseul, his legs planted on a chair, one of his wide hands braced on his knee and the other gesticulating. He was leaning forward towards the audience filling the rest of the chairs, talking as though they were all his best friends.

What he was talking about was the sadly decayed state of commerce through Corseul's port. That remark of Clent's about the ship captain's opinions of customs duties, along with her own observations concerning the lack of activity about the docks, had caught up to Mosca halfway back to the city. She had immediately set about finding out what was happening. As near as she could tell, the customs duties and docking fees were too high, and some foreign powers who placed a premium on being friendly with Mandelion had placed embargoes on other ports in the realm. Put together, these factors were strangling the business of the port, which was slowly beginning to reflect on the rest of the city.

Mosca had at once seen the wisdom of having Beech put about that as mayor his less intolerant attitude towards Mandelion might entice the foreign powers to lift their embargoes, and also that he would be likely to bring fees down to a manageable level.

Whether he would or would not was outside of Mosca's concern, but Clent had voiced the somewhat informed view that Pontivy was pocketing the difference between what the fees were and what they ought to have been. That suggested Beech could lower them without draining the city's treasury.

"But Mr. Pontivy's swimming in money, isn't he?" she had asked. "What's he got to do a stupid thing like steal from the city for, just to squeeze out a few more shillings?"

"I would not care to speculate," Clent had answered primly, "on the motivations of our social superiors."

Which Mosca had taken as a challenge to work it out for herself. So far she had arrived at the hypothesis that having money just made you want more money, and damn the consequences.  

Beech, at any rate, was doing a creditable job of regurgitating the results of Mosca's investigations, less any hint of accusation against Pontivy. That was not how he wanted to win an election, he kept saying, and Mosca was resigned to letting him think all that was done in his name was pure as the driven.

"Miss Mye? A moment? Miss? Only there are some people here you might want to talk to…"

Mosca tore her eyes away from Beech, frowning. "What people?" she hissed.

It was Morningjoy, a footman in Beech's household, an uncommonly serene youth with a neatly stitched cut running into his hairline – he was the same footman who had taken a head wound from Pontivy's bullies. Someone must have decided that made him sturdy enough of spirit to approach Mosca with bad news. He stood his ground, quirked his lips apologetically, and answered, "Some constables, miss, and some folks what do business with Mr. Pontivy. They're saying… they're saying we're not allowed to be here."

"Oh, they are, are they? Guess I'd better see what that's about."

In the street before the inn, Mosca did indeed find a group of constables and local dignitaries. There were about a dozen of them in all. Mosca recognized many by sight and could put a likely name to the others: Mr. Stokes, whose land covered hundreds of acres to the north and grew famous plums; Mr. Whitehope, who owned the city's largest brewery; Mr. Ellsworth, in whose workshops fine linens were woven; weary-looking Mr. Vauxley, the physician of the wealthy. Others. Mosca thought that before her she saw concentrated at least half the city's wealth, and she drew herself up.

"Can I help you gentlemen?" she asked.

One of the constables stepped forward. Mosca recognized him, too. His name was Tanner. He was tall and gangling and had a face that was all tragic pits. His pale eyes shone sadly out of the two deepest pits as he stared down at Mosca. "Are _you_ the person responsible for this illegal gathering?"

"Don't have to sound so disbelieving," grumbled Mosca. "You all know who I am by now. You, too, Constable Tanner. Yes, I am responsible for the meeting. How can it be illegal when Mr. Pontivy held a gathering right here for his friends not one week ago?"

"That," said the constable, clearing his throat, "was a party for Mr. Pontivy's friends. This is a political gathering. Entirely against city regulations."

"Why are you bothering, Tanner?" called Mr. Whitehope. "They have no intention of moving on. Let us go in."  

The others laughed and shouted encouragement, as if they all thought they were doing something fine and brave.

"You want to go in?" asked Mosca, purely for the sake of saying something. "You want to see what a friendly gathering this is? 'Cause it's no more politics than Mr. Pontivy's was, I promise."

And no less politics, of course, but that was the whole point.

"I already told you, Mr. Whitehope, no one is going in anywhere," said Constable Tanner, placatingly. "Either Mr. Beech and his associates vacate the premises, or I will levy a fine against him. Perhaps I will arrest this young person for disrupting the peace." His eyes flickered back down to Mosca.

"Mr. Pontivy pays your wages, is that it, and you're expecting it'll stay that way?"

All the tragic pits in Constable Tanner's face deepened. "There's no call to go making personal accusations."

Mosca, biting back some further personal accusations, did some quick figuring. The election was days away. What would happen if she let Beech be fined? If she herself was arrested? She had no doubt Beech would be able to pay it, and fish her out of prison… if he wanted to, by then, which was unlikely. Hands curling in rage, she made her decision.

"If you gentlemen could all just wait out here, patient-like, I'll go inside and explain to Mr. Beech how things look."

Tanner's tragic face crumpled into a pathetic look of relief, like a dog who has avoided a blow. A round of hearty laughter went up from the dignitaries, and Mosca nearly changed her mind. She might have, if making it up in the first place had taken less of her strength.

"Do lighten up, girl," said weary Mr. Vauxley the physician, in a voice that did sound nearly kind. "This has all been a nice distraction, but it is our votes you need, and our votes you were never going to have. All the playacting is just that."

Mosca stood on the threshold of the inn door and met the man's eyes squarely. She had the satisfaction of seeing him look away first, but then, it was only to shake his head pityingly. _Has children of his own,_ thought Mosca, automatic and disparaging. Jaw clenching painfully with anger, she went inside and interrupted Beech in the calmest voice she could muster. It sounded to her own ears like the pronouncement of a harbinger of death. She kept having to stop to collect herself.  

"There's some friends of Mr. Pontivy outside, Mr. Beech, and it looks as though… they'd booked the whole place to have a dinner here tonight, and now… it'd only be polite, you know, to leave…"

At that moment she hated Beech's wide, innocent eyes and his boisterous voice as he said, "Well, of course it would only be polite! What a mix-up! I am so terribly sorry, everyone!"

He was going to find out the truth eventually, Mosca supposed, but this way would not embarrass them all so much in front of the crowd. The assembly dispersed with confused but surprising speed.

Back at Beech's house, Mosca shut herself in her closet office and tried not to shake herself silly with rage.

 _It's no use having most of the city on Mr. Beech's side,_  she thought in towering disgust, _when the ones doing the voting are all Mr. Pontivy's cronies. All those rich men who looked at me like so much dirt, them and all their ilk, are the ones who decide things around here if you stick to the law. Maybe,_  thought Mosca, _a little violence like the Locksmiths want isn't such a bad idea after all. It worked in Mandelion, and why shouldn't it work here? I've tried out this election tomfoolery and it's all gone nowhere, and now I can leave off…_

But she could not. Even before her fury had subsided, Mosca's practicality asserted itself: they needed Beech's money, and he surely would not hand it over if Mosca saw him appointed mayor on the say-so of a mob. So really, principle aside, there was no choice in the matter.

That made her feel better and worse at the same time.

 _Use the law, will you?_ she thought, remembering the superior smugness of the dignitaries. _That's not a game you want to be playing against me._

***

But the day before the election, Mosca had yet to lay her hands on the right game piece, and she was beginning to be frantic.

In the middle of the morning she returned from a secret meeting to her secondary campaign office at the University.

Not only had the students proposed the establishment of such an office as the next logical step, they had even gone so far as to find the space for her. Seeing as so much of her efforts to combat the Locksmith agents provocateurs centered on the University, she had agreed that it was just good sense.

Mosca's secret meeting had been with Mistress Walty. The merry widow had been warned to back off: the Locksmiths knew Mosca suspected their agent, but not that she had betrayed them. Mosca had guarded their connection from view as carefully as she knew how: no notes or messages were passed between them; they saw each other infrequently and arranged their next meeting in advance, at a different time and place than before, with fallbacks in case something went wrong; no one but Clent had been let into the secret of Mistress Walty's role, and Mosca was not entirely certain she would have gone even that far if circumstances had not forced her hand.

Mosca's heart always gave a little stutter of relief when she found Mistress Walty where she was supposed to be; her imagination was just too good at unscrolling the terrors that might befall her unwilling ally if the Locksmiths knew she had betrayed them. It had been a danger uppermost in Mosca's mind this morning of all mornings.

The night before, she had learned that the accomplice of Clent's would-be assassin had been found dead in his cell, with no marks of violence on him but with pain and terror stamped onto his still face. 

A wave of sickness had come over Mosca when she heard this. She had, somehow, lost sight of the accomplice altogether. There was so much else to think about, so much to keep track of, but all the same...

Constable Tanner, the hollows of his face deeper than ever, had brought the news. _Did you do it?_ Mosca had thought bitterly. _Or did you only let them in and stand by while it was done? Did it make you sick?_

 _That's why it can't always be violence,_ she had thought, later. _You get used to violence and soon enough you're murdering people for not doing their jobs good enough._

It had been a bitter blow, a reminder of her enemy's strength, and her mood had yet to recover.

So here Mosca was at her desk in the University office, taking yet another fruitless stab at addressing the hateful ballot problem, when a pretty maid named Holly looked in. Technically there was no maid assigned to Mosca's office – it was, in truth, a covered over and blocked off section of porch, dignified with the name of "office" only so long as the weather held good – but Holly took care of the classrooms in the rest of the building and had assigned herself to Mosca out of curiosity or perhaps even friendliness.

"There you are," she said, strolling in. She was one of those people who thought appearing to be in a hurry was a sign of weakness. "You never showed."

"Busy," answered Mosca, which was only too true.

For the past few nights she had been sleeping when she could in a corner of Holly's room on the University grounds, but last night had been too full for her to think of sleep. She had a nap penciled in on her agenda for late in the afternoon. After that she would likely be up until it was all over.

"Talley and Crex were looking for you," announced Holly. "They found something, only don't ask me what, 'cause they weren't making any sense I could understand."

"Well, they know where to find me."

"Not sure they do. Said something about spending all night holed up in Windermere's library. A death-trap, that is, full of brain-eating fungus."

Sharply, Mosca said, "And they found something for me there?"

Before she could go in search of them – or, more practically, ask Holly to corral them – the two students tumbled into her office. They were swaying with weariness, but their tired faces glowed. The weeks of activity had made them both less diffident, but this morning they were ready to burst into flames of enthusiasm.

"Got something good for me?" asked Mosca, grinning because it was clear they did.

"I'll leave you to it," Holly called on her lingering way out. "Send a runner if you need me 'fore I get through with my round."

Talley hefted an ancient book and dropped it onto Mosca's desk, raising a cloud of pungent dust.

"Careful!" yelped Crex. Talley doubled over in a fit of giggles, clutching the edge of Mosca's desk, causing Crex to shoot back an exaggerated grimace. Light-headed exhaustion hung around them in a cloud like the dust around the book.

Talley opened the book to a place marked with a slip of rag. "Here," he said, pointing finger hovering just over the page. "It's what you were looking for."

"Election law," Crex supplied, "old, very old. But never overturned. Entirely valid."

"Talked to Professor Moraine about it," Talley added, nodding. "Wouldn't have under normal circumstances – the man is a kind of basilisk, scares me silly – but he knows the law. He agreed with us."

Mosca turned the book around – this time Talley hissed, "Softly!" and Crex giggled – and peered at the indicated passage. The printing was old-fashioned and close and difficult to make out. Mosca muttered to herself as she read: "'Company of Stationers…with an overseeing body that shall be…representatives of the after-named guilds…certify validity of ballots.'" She blinked, then read it all again. Then she flipped delicately through the pages before and after it. Then, after reading the passage a third time, she said, "And this is still valid, you said?"

"Absolutely, sir," said Crex, "ma'am, I mean. Windermere is where the official records were kept for centuries. There'd be another copy in the Great Hall, but it was burned, of course."

Here Talley interrupted: "Of course the Stationers back then were not what they are now, a respectable body of men, but no titans of the realm."

"This law means," Mosca said, slowly and wonderingly, "the Stationers can insist on getting together a panel of guildsmen, who'll have to sit right up by the Great Hall and watch them check each and every ballot before it's cast. There'll be no way to claim they've been tampered with! There'll even be a Locksmith right there! And it's all legal!"

"Yes, that's just how we saw it!" said Crex, grinning drunkenly.

"And good old Moraine, too," added Talley.

Mosca could feel herself getting just as worked up as the students and reeled herself back to earth a little, adding, "'Course Locksmiths don't often care 'bout _legal_ , only in this case they'd have a guild war on their hands if they tried to go against it, and I don't think they're willing to risk that over this election."

Crex, in a faltering voice, as if he had just discovered the possibility of the world not going according to plan, said, "And the Stationers might not go for it. It all depends on them, doesn't it?"

"Oh, they'll go for it all right," said Mosca decisively. "I'll make 'em."

She sent the students off to get some well-deserved rest with an injunction to keep quiet about their discovery. Then she had to decide how best to approach Corseul's Stationers. _Not like I can walk up to them myself and put it to them,_ she thought, dismayed by the thought of delegating yet another vital task. She would need a dependable representative.

Luckily she knew just where to find one.

Holly came back before Mosca needed to send a runner. "The Stationers come by sometimes to inspect the press, don't they?" she asked at once.

"Every week," confirmed Holly.

"The next time they come…"

"Oh, in about an hour and a half, give or take. Your lucky day?" Holly pursued, chuckling as Mosca jumped to her feet in delight.

"We'll see about that," she said, prowling in the small space beside her desk. "But for now… Holly, can you get Professor Kittiwake here, fast as you can?"

That turned out to be _very_ fast indeed.

"Are you absolutely certain it is me you want, Miss Mye?" the old man asked once she had laid out her plan to him. He was sipping from a glass of sherry Mosca had not previously known it was in her power to offer a guest. "I am willing, of course, and if you believe there is no one better suited to bring your proposal before Deckle Frets, I will serve. But I remind you that I am a mathematician, not a lawyer."

"But you do speak so well, professor, and I don't think they'd be buyin' if a lawyer was sellin'. 'Sides, you're so respectable and mild-looking. You'll do just fine."

"Well – well – if you insist," murmured the professor, a faint flush rising in his withered cheeks. "You must allow me to consult a legally-minded colleague first, at least, or I will sound an absolute fool."

"Yeah, all right. Let's us both step over and have a quick word with Professor Moraine." He already knew what was afoot, after Talley and Crex had gone and consulted him. "But _very_ quick, professor. Time is against us here."

She let the two scholars carry the conversation. Now that she had the scheme in her mind, she felt she could not breathe easy until she was sure she had the Stationers' cooperation. The breakneck pace of events was mesmerizing.

"Now, Mr. Frets is going to be at Press House inspectin' the works," said Mosca, when she had had enough of waiting. "You just go right up to 'em and explain everything plain as you can. I don't know what their feelings may be about Mr. Pontivy personally, but I know they won't like him as a Locksmith puppet." And, as they crossed the campus from Professor Moraine's rooms to Press House, Mosca from time to time nervously pulling ahead of Professor Kittiwake's sedate pace and doubling back, she delivered a strongly worded and slightly embarrassed lecture warning him against any mentions of radicalism, Quillam or Mosca Mye, Mandelion, Birdcatchery, or even, if he could help it, representative government.

The professor took it all in with gentle amusement. "I have been so well-tutored now, Miss Mye, I hardly see how I can fail."

Mosca grinned sheepishly at him.

She had not needed a single moment's thought to plot a course through the campus towards Press House. It drew her as though she were a compass needle showing the way north: a three-story tower covered in ivy, set among its own wedge of close-planted parkland to keep the sounds of the two printing presses within from troubling the academic pursuits around it. Mosca had been inside it only once, and then briefly, but she could not pass it without feeling a thrill in the pit of her stomach.

Inside, Press House was lofty and open, full of sun from the skylights slashed into its roof. The workings of the two presses were laid out separately. Mosca wrenched her hungry eyes away from first one, and then the other.

Frets was there already, accompanied by two apprentices. One was flipping through manuscripts, and the other frowningly inspecting an enormously complicated ledger with the director of the University Press looming anxiously nearby as though the ledger were his child. Frets, a short, round-bodied man with skinny legs, was walking around the one press currently in operation with a pompous look on his florid face. Mosca nudged Professor Kittiwake towards him and struck up a conversation with one of the press operators herself. There was no point in hiding from Frets, he had seen her plenty of times in the past weeks and must have had at least an idea of who she was, but Professor Kittiwake must be the primary point of contact.

The Stationer appeared to receive the professor's greeting readily enough. Between trying to keep up her conversation – and often dropping the thread, to the vast entertainment of the press operator – and the clamor of the working press, Mosca missed most of their conversation.

She heard the professor mention the "unprecedented circumstances this year" and the "most appalling rumors of a certain guild planning a coup, if I may be permitted to use such an infamous word," and she watched Frets's face grow suspicious, angry, and astounded by turns. In a lull his voice, which was as thick as though he were speaking through a pillow, came to her clearly: "A lucky thing this law should have been discovered. I will need to examine the book myself, naturally, but if all is as you say, professor, I confess myself desperately interested…" Then it was once again too noisy to hear, but Frets and the professor went on getting friendlier and friendlier, until at last they clasped hands and went their separate ways.

Mosca had by now stopped pretending to do anything but stare at the negotiation. She left the laughing press operator behind and skipped after Professor Kittiwake.

"Well?" she asked as soon as they were both outside. She was fizzing from excitement and anticipation, and also because the moment Professor Kittiwake had left him, Deckle Frets had unerringly sought Mosca out across the vast space and looked straight into her eyes with an expression of challenge and mistrust.

"I have found Mr. Frets a reasonable man, with an eye towards his own best interests. You will not object to my having arranged a meeting with him later today so he may examine the book and hear of its provenance from your friends in the rhetorical faculty?"

"That's just perfect," said Mosca, "you've done marvelously, professor, I _told_ you."

"You did indeed," Professor Kittiwake replied happily. "I begin to think, Miss Mye, you could talk anyone into anything."

"That's what they pay me for," Mosca replied glibly. But when they had parted, the professor back to his duties and Mosca to oversee Arvor Beech's last public appearance before the election, his words began to stir uneasily in her mind.

 _Figure it out later, you dolt, you dimwit,_ she told herself fiercely. _This isn't over yet, you've got no time for moping._

She really needed that nap.

The last weeks had been all one mad scramble punctuated by nervous, held-breath gaps of waiting to see if a new card laid down would knock over the whole house. But sometime very soon the last card – or rather, the last ballot – would be laid down, and it would all, for better or worse, be behind her.

And then there would be no excuses, and she would have to sit down and reckon with whatever her conscience had been getting up to behind her back.

***

"Did I do the right thing?"

Eponymous Clent stared at her as if she had sprouted a second head.

"One of these days, Mosca…"

"People have been pushing me about for years," Mosca explained, or tried to explain. "I hate it, and I hate them that done it. Now I've rounded up some push for myself, an' if I'm the one doing the pushing – "

" – you count yourself lucky that the wheel has turned," Clent promptly cut in. His tone was firm and final, but his expression seemed to be having a hard time matching it.

"I'll work it out for myself," Mosca warned.

"I depend upon it," Clent returned dryly.

It was an hour to dawn on Election Day, and the pair were perched like two alley cats – or like one alley cat and one portly man – on the wall at the highest end of the University campus. They had met here almost every night since the meeting at the docks. Mosca had had an easy trek from Holly's room, and Clent had been taking advantage of the fact that Escrow Pontivy's camp had its headquarters almost at the base of one of the many sets of steps cut into the stone holding up the University. The gate at the top was shut up permanently – a never-repaired defense from when Corseul had seen battle during the Civil War – but with a little agility and help from a confederate at the top, it was possible to slither up onto the overhanging wall from the top steps.

Mosca sniffed the air. "Reckon it's time, Mr. Clent."

"Indeed. Mosca, can I depend upon you to move to one of our contingencies in case events fail to unfold as we hope?"

"I'll get away, if I have to. And you remember how to pull your disappearing act? When you absolutely got to, or if it looks like Mr. Pontivy suspects something, or the Locksmiths are about to crush you under a spinet or brain you with a brick?"

Clent winced. "The plan is graven upon my heart."

"You sure he hasn't caught wind yet?"

"Who do you take me for, child? Do you suppose me to be helpless in the face of my persecutors?"

"Helpless as a mongoose down a hole," Mosca conceded.

Clent received the concession smugly. "There you have it."

"That's all, then." Mosca drummed her heels against the outside of the wall. "No time left to lollygag."

Clent turned and began his descent. "If you would be so good as to help me off this wall, madam?"

They had become rather deft at performing this operation. Fifteen seconds, some puffing from Clent, and a couple of paint-stripping curses from Mosca, and Clent had hoisted himself back down to the steps. He stood there shifting his weight from foot to foot, peering up, face a pale spot in the dark.

Mosca hung briefly over the wall. "See you when it's over, Mr. Clent." And she scrambled back down to the base of the wall on the University side, where Saracen was keeping watch for her.

She was far from the only person awake and about at this gray hour. All through the campus she met busy, tense-faced students and faculty and staff, preparing for the day ahead. Mosca had become a familiar sight over the past weeks, and most of those she encountered gave her vague smiles or doubtful looks or battle-ready glares, a whole chorus of expressions that heard together asked whether she was quite sure she knew what she was doing. No one spoke to her.

Mosca was ready for this day to be over, for this whole adventure to be behind them. Clent had peevishly remarked the other day that this sort of crime was far too much like honest work for his taste, and Mosca had to agree.

She had friends. She had _resources_. She could make things happen and people move just by wishing it. And while she was not sure she always liked that, sometimes she knew she liked it a little too much. There was a whole unhappy jumble of thoughts about this experience she would only be able to untangle in peace. First, though, today had to go well. Beech had to win, and the peace had to be kept.

All told, Mosca was confident she had prepared for nearly anything. _Nearly_ was dangerous, but it was a better place to be standing than none at all. Just about now she hoped the Locksmiths would be discovering that the first of their ploys had been nipped in the bud.

Now if not earlier in the morning, the head of the Locksmiths, who Mosca guessed had not slept any more than she had, would be receiving a visit from a trio of Stationers explaining their decision to call upon the old law and extending an invitation for him to sit on the ballot inspecting panel himself or to send a representative in his place.

"The law is old but sound," Mosca imagined Mr. Frets saying in his slushy voice. "In so extraordinary a year, when upholding the rule of law weighs so heavily on us all, we feel it of the utmost necessity to ensure a fair and orderly election. Beyond all doubt."

And the barely glimpsed Mr. Cantharel would put on a sour smile and accept the proposal, seeing the Locksmiths' plan of accusing Beech of rigging the vote go up in a puff of musty lawbook dust.

So Mosca hoped, at least.

It was nearly light when she reached the Great Hall, which dominated Corseul's central square. There the election would be held.

Earlier that very night, this edifice had been personally and secretly inspected by the selfsame Mosca for booby traps, secret passages and nooks, weaponry, incendiary devices, and every other possible threat a fevered and imaginative young mind could conjure. The Hall had been partly burnt down during the Civil War, and repaired since; the scarred-over joins between old and new had been the subject of a great deal of Mosca's focus. In the end, she had turned up nothing.

The Stationers and their panel of guildsmen observers were already installed at a long table outside. Mosca felt a moment's pity: a couple looked green with dread at the prospect of irritating the Locksmiths, but more than few were bright-eyed and bouncing, as if they expected violence to break out after all. Mr. Cantharel of the Locksmiths had come himself. His pale face wore a frozen, urbane look badly masking impotent hatred.

At the sight of him Mosca's joints went watery with relief. It had been one thing to argue that the Locksmiths would not risk a guild war over this election, and another thing to believe it. She had not been entirely sure until just now. It was Cantharel's hand. His gloved right fist pressed just below his left collarbone, knuckles kneading at the skin over and over and over in tiny circular motions. Not the gesture of a man in control.

"Ballots," Mosca breathed. One threat subdued.

The polls would not open until the sun had fully risen, bringing in the day ruled by Goodman Rightlook, He Who Sees Fair Play Done. It was funny choice: Rightlook was the Beloved who oversaw children's games, and his statues depicted a dour-faced little man in fool's garb holding a spinning top in one hand.

Though the high Great Hall doors were still shut, a long line of men stood waiting. Beside the line, trestle tables laden with covered dishes, pitchers of ale, and urns of tea stood waiting as well, attended by smartly dressed serving boys and girls.

At the table nearest the Great Hall presided resplendent Mistress Beech, seconded by the housekeeper Bulge, and an older, pinch-faced woman who Mosca guessed was Mistress Pontivy. Mistress Beech, spying Mosca, beckoned to her with a delicate hand. Mosca swent to her with mingled reluctance and curiosity. She had dutifully been on her guard after Clent's warning, and Mistress Beech, she thought, had been avoiding her.

"Have all the arrangements been made to your satisfaction, dear girl?" asked Brambleberry Beech.

"Near as can get," Mosca answered. "I like what you've done here." She gestured to encompass the tables, the servers, and Mistress Pontivy waiting a few steps off, backed by three well-dressed young women who might have been her daughters or daughters-in-law.

"Oh, I saw where my duty lay here. We would not want the men to get hungry or thirsty as they wait. That might cause problems, wouldn't you say, my dear little Miss Mye? And we wouldn't want that all."

Mosca ground her teeth behind a sickly smile. "That's clever of you, Mistress Beech. Maybe you should've been running the campaign."

Tall and stately Mistress Beech lowered herself a little so her eyes were level with Mosca's. They were a warm light brown, sweet as honey, set among many tiny lines. She was older than she looked. She took Mosca's hands in both of her hands. In a velvet voice she said, "Oh, dear me, no. I think we are both exactly where we ought to be."

She straightened up and nodded a dismissal. Ears hot with shame and rage, Mosca backed away, muttering a string of oaths under her breath. Brambleberry Beech had a story, and likely it was a story Mosca would enjoy hearing one day. But as to Mistress Beech herself, Mosca could happily go the rest of her life without coming in reach of her again.

Then the town officials nominally responsible for the election, clearly nervous from close contact with so many guildsmen, blew the traditional horn and ponderously swung open the doors. The front of the line was admitted. The day's festivities had begun.

The candidates were not permitted near the Hall, except when they cast their own votes. Mosca had no specific place to be, so she walked up and down the slow-moving line, keeping to the side and listening carefully.

"What's the good of this, I wonder? Pontivy won't take it, that's what I says, even if we do our part and get Beech in. Only way to do it is to get Pontivy out ourselves – with our own hands, as you'd say."

It was someone standing in the line, well back from the head, speaking just above a whisper. A very plausible-looking man, a cheap, flashy waistcoat showing under his rough coat. Heads around him bobbed, towards him, away from him.

A group of students and the maidens they had been chatting to strolled over from where they had been decoratively leaning against a wall. The speaker, with another volley, had lured someone to answer him.

"What I figure is, we wait, and then – "

"Pardon," oozed one of the students. "I could not help overhearing, sir. That is a dire prediction! I sympathize with you, I do, but I can't help but think cooler tempers will carry the day here. Let us wait and see, and trust in our ways, shall we?"

The most fashionable of the maidens let out a decorous sigh. "Violence would be quite unbearable, and I am sure Mr. Pontivy is a reasonable man. He would not want to cause an uproar, would he? Pray be calm, sir." And she fluttered her lashes, and for good measure tapped the man on the shoulder with the very tip of her lacy parasol.

 _That's layin' it on all right,_ thought Mosca with satisfaction.

The would-be rabble-rouser, consternated and pink, muttered something about how he had "just been saying, is all."

Mosca nodded to herself and moved on. The Locksmith plants were being dealt with admirably. In an effort nothing short of heroic, most of the University's complement of students had been recruited to stroll around keeping an ear out and drench any incipient fires with the waters of mildness and good-nature. Some students had wheedled along lady friends for the task, and the University maids had come along, too. In fact, the fashionable maiden who had been so convincing just now was Mosca's sometime-host, sometime-helper Holly, in a borrowed dress with her soft brown hair arranged in stylish ringlets.

Mosca had not realized until she had put out the call just how much real resentment there was against Pontivy.

In the middle of the morning a light rain fell. Afterwards the sun, modestly veiled in haze, peeped out and called up a warm film of moisture into the air. By noon it was hot and humid and generally as unpleasant as an early autumn day could be. Tempers, like starched linens, were apt to wilt in such weather. Mistress Beech's ale had been a very good idea.

Despite being as cranky and uncomfortable from the sticky heat as anyone, Mosca was beginning to grant herself a measure of relaxation towards the end of the afternoon. Voting would end soon. Nothing worse had happened than a couple of the plants becoming desperate and resorting to throwing punches. The resulting fights had been quickly broken up. Mosca thought she had glimpsed the bellicose Hasp before he was dragged away.

Mosca and Saracen had taken up a vantage point in front of an inn across the square from the Great Hall. Mosca kept her eyes fixed on the doors and the ritual happening at the table.

Each man gave his name. He was ticked off a list, given a rectangle of cardstock from one of a dozen wooden boxes, and accompanied inside by one of the Great Hall's runners.

Women were, frustratingly, not allowed inside during the proceedings. Only intense interest in what was passing in the street had kept Mosca from sneaking in to have a look out of sheer teeth-itching frustration. At any rate, she knew from being told that each man was taken behind a curtain and allowed to drop a ballot through one of two slits in a sort of enormous chest: the right slit for the incumbent Mr. Pontivy, the left for Mr. Beech.

"Are you trying to bring the whole building down, or only a table leg? Ouch! Eep!"

Mosca jumped and stared up. Then she looked quickly down. Deckle Frets, head of the Corseul Stationers, was tottering over her. He was tottering because Saracen had him by the ankle. Mosca had seen him get up from his place at the table, leaving another Stationer to spell him. She had not watched him after that, which had clearly been a mistake.

"Shouldn't sneak up on people," she advised the Stationer. "'specially not ones as got a goose." Gently, she coaxed Saracen into releasing the offending ankle.

"Yes, I have been warned about the goose. And about you, Mosca Mye." An odd, rueful pause. "I believe you and your, ah, _former_ associate helped deliver the letter carrying the word, as it happens."

"Ah," said Mosca. She picked Saracen up and balanced him on her knees. She might have to run. "You… knew about all that?"

"We have known all along." Mr. Frets sounded faintly disappointed. "But we don't appreciate Mr. Pontivy, or anyone else, interfering in our business. We have a good thing here with the University – they can be free-thinking, but not too free-thinking, and we receive cooperation. We would rather you and that two-bit doggerel-pusher Clent tinkered with the election than get our own hands dirty with such things."

Mosca hardly believed her burning ears, but she tried to rally. "Then you aren't going to rat me out or hand me over to…" She left a speaking pause. If even she was not entirely certain just how much of the Locksmiths' actions was personal vendetta against her and Clent, then there was no telling how well-informed Frets was on the subject. Better to let him show his hand.

"We shall not. But I advise you to make yourself scarce once the results have been tallied." He blinked slowly. He had very dark green eyes, like he was growing a forest inside his head. "Both of you."

Mosca nodded; it had been a highly deniable answer, but an answer still. "Soon's we get paid." She did not expect Frets to offer to chip in towards this excellent cause, but fishing could not hurt.

"A pleasure doing business with you. Knew your father." And with that pronouncement Frets walked back across the square to rejoin his fellows, limping a little.

Mosca dammed up a waiting flood of relief foamed with panic. Time for that later. When the results had been tallied, as Frets had said.

_Free-thinking, but not too free-thinking. That Mr. Frets is going to be in for a surprise one of these days._

The minutes crawled on, and nothing happened, and nothing happened, and the air cooled and the light mellowed. Dusk neared…

All day Mosca had listened to the symphony of sounds made by the election process. When a strange, disruptive new melody picked up and began to warp the harmonies around it, Mosca's heart gave a warning throb. Something was Wrong.

Mosca hurried across the square towards the knot of people gathered in front of the church that sat at an angle from the Great Hall. The church had been built with a high porch to guard against flooding, and right now a man was using that high ground to lift himself above the crowd. He was around sixty years old, wearing a small, neat wig. Everything about him was precise and plain, and breathed of the wealth it took to have everything _just so._ There was one deep line between his silvery brows, and a line like a gash down each cheek. His voice was stronger than you would have expected. This was Escrow Pontivy, mayor of Corseul.

This was what Mosca heard him saying: "…no better than dogs! Less than dogs! My friends, you have all been taken in by a dangerous agent of Mandelion, that city of chaos and corruption. Oh yes!" to the alarmed murmur. "Arvor Beech may sound like an honest, sane kind of man, but there, a man's common origin will always tell. The madness of radicalism has crept into his undefended brain and taken root. I am trying to keep you safe, my good and wise neighbors. All I have done – all I will do, if you will allow me – is to stop this dangerous man from overturning the order of our happy, prosperous lives here." And on, and on.

 _But it's too late,_ Mosca thought desperately. _The voting's over, just about. If he'd wanted to budge them it should have been this morning..._

There was someone on the church steps just below Pontivy, and he was looking out into the crowd. In fact, Cantharel of the Locksmiths was looking right at Mosca, knowingly, pityingly, triumphantly. He held up one finger of his languid right hand: _Listen for it._

It was not about votes anymore. The Locksmiths had pushed Pontivy up onto that porch to cause trouble. Mosca had foreseen and forestalled their other tactics; they had come up with something else.

"My friends! You have seen a certain black-eyed imp scampering over our fair city like a low insect, going where it will, boldly waggling its tongue, filling men's minds with poison."

_Uh-oh._

"Who is this girlchild – " Pontivy's composure was dissolving at an incredible pace, like a biscuit falling apart as the warm milk of the crowd's mounting anger soaked into it. Had she been the Locksmiths, Mosca would not have wanted him up in front of a crowd. " – who is this troublemaker but an infamous rebel herself? Young in years but ancient in devilry! Wanted for her many crimes, her scheming and skulking and unruly ways! That is who my opponent chooses to consort with. That is – what are you doing! Get – get down! Back, I say!"

Mosca had not thought about it. She had seen a path through the crowd and taken it, and now she was up on the steps beside Pontivy with a brain full of humming and a budding mob staring up at her with eyes that were emptying of thought.

"Mr. Pontivy's right!" she screamed. She had their attention. "You _have_ all seen me. You have seen me go about giving people facts. You've had all the facts put in front of you by both sides, and today you voted on how those facts looked to you. Isn't that what your election is for?"

Was it working? Was she making any sense? No one had thrown anything at her, and she had not been dragged off the porch. Pontivy was staring open-mouthed at her. Up close, he looked ragged at the edges, on the point of dropping.

"Plenty of you know my father was Quillam Mye." She had dropped her voice so the crowd would have to listen close to hear it. They quieted. The faintest murmur stirred the air. "You have read his books or had them read to you, and that's because Corseul is a learned city, and you all know that is no bad thing. You all know that having the facts is better than being kept in the dark. Mr. Pontivy says he wants to protect, but he is trying to keep you in the dark. Have you been listening to him? Did you pick up a shred of proof in all his dread-mongering? No?"

She was not sure if it was her words or her manner, but calm was spreading in ripples away from her. The crowd was dispersing at the edges.

"Look, Mr. Pontivy." The mayor looked alarmed at being addressed by an imp of darkness, and white-faced Cantharel fixed her with his outraged stare. _Too bad,_ thought Mosca. _You're no Aramai Goshawk, and after I'm through with you,_ he'll _eat you for breakfast._ "You've done what you could. Mr. Beech has done what he could. Why don't you just see what happens? It does not look good, carrying on and throwing a tantrum about radicals just because you're scared of losing for the first time in your life."

Mosca almost held her breath. If Pontivy could find something, anything to say now...

But he couldn't. He was used to being comfortable. Beech's campaign had been making him uncomfortable for weeks; Clent's scheming had stripped his home of comfort for days; and Pontivy was simply unequipped to face disagreement before a crowd. His mouth gaped foolishly.

_Steady now._

Casually, Mosca added, "Besides, you're the one employing a notorious crook. Or don't you know?"

He did know. It was written on his red face, and you did not have to be Mosca Mye to read it there. A stifled laugh went up from the crowd.

"He – " Pontivy was fuming. "That fiend Clent is not – Employing – Damn your eyes, witch, the man has disappeared! Stolen – stolen – "

He must have noticed the laughter gathering strength. He stopped. No one had prepared him for this.

Mosca clicked her tongue. "Aren't you clever enough to keep rabble like that off your staff, then? Mr. Beech is."

There were a few titters, but mostly it was a soft sigh of tension releasing and good humor wafting in. There would be no riot now. Mosca scooped Saracen up once more and announced her intention to pray for a calm end to the day. A couple of people offered up confused applause, and Mosca disappeared into the church. It had occurred to her that she wanted to be out of Cantharel's sight.

Mosca paused for a moment in front of the statue of Goodman Rightlook. Especially gloomy he was looking today, in the shadows of the church. In his shallow offerings bowl someone had left a headless ceramic figure of a knight and a well-thumbed pack of playing cards missing about half its number.

"I'd be grim, too," Mosca told him, moving on. She left by a back exit onto an unobserved alley.

She had been right. This thing Corseul had was not sustainable. No, there would be no violence now – Pontivy had been too thoroughly embarrassed, she was sure of it. But it was not the election laws or Pontivy's or Beech's or anyone's respect for them that had done that. It had been sneaking and guile and lightning decisions, quite a lot of it done by Mosca herself. That was not proof that the system worked; that was proof that the system could not support itself under the least pressure.

There was a good idea here, buried under the same fundamental unfairness Mosca had seen everywhere in the realm. A good idea, and she had kept the Locksmiths from stamping on the embers of it. It might flare up into a bonfire one day and start giving Corseul's neighbors just those notions the Locksmiths did not want getting around.

Mosca twisted through the darkening streets until she reached a laundry with rooms above it. In one of the rooms she found Mistress Walty. The widow was packing her things. She had only one hand free to do it with, because the other hand was balancing a full purse.

"He got it to you all right, then?"

Mistress Walty answered, "He did not look best pleased, but Mr. Clent delivered on your promise."

Mosca nodded and summoned up a smile. It had always been one of the weaker points of the plan: whether Clent, actually in possession of the money stolen from Pontivy, could bring himself to hand it over to Juniper Walty, who needed it to pay her husband's ruinous debts with the Locksmiths and then split town.

"But what if Beech loses after all?" Mistress Walty asked.

"That'd be a problem." Mosca allowed a significant pause to swell. "I reckon you can keep a secret, if you want to, Mistress Walty."

"Miss Mye, I am flattered by your good opinion."

"I fixed the ballot chest," Mosca admitted.

Mistress Walty gaped and spluttered something of an inquisitive nature.

"Last night," Mosca continued. "Remember I asked if you'd give me an introduction to some clever-fingered friends of yours as might be unaffiliated?" Unaffiliated with the Locksmiths, that was.

"Indeed I do recall that."

"I had Seedsnipe rig me up a contraption. Every fifth ballot for Mr. Pontivy goes into Mr. Beech's box. Figure that's not enough to make anyone take notice. Enough to win, though." The contraption itself was subtle enough to go unnoticed unless someone was looking for it, and the chest was ceremonially burnt once the ballots had been removed to be counted. It was a risk, but one well worth taking.

Mistress Walty laughed gaily. "What an enterprising scoundrel you are. What happened to a fair election?"

Mosca shrugged. "Not my problem, is it?"

The University was safe. Corseul was safe. In a more attenuated but far more important way, _Mandelion_ was a little safer than it had been before. All that was worth a fair election, surely. _And he'd probably have won without it,_ she told herself.

They sat up talking, Mistress Walty now truly merry at the prospect of a life not beholden to the Locksmiths, but Mosca was fading. After she nearly dozed into the wine Mistress Walty had poured her, she stumbled over to the fireplace, curled up in a nest of blankets, and with Saracen at her back fell fast asleep.

***

Two mornings later, Mosca stood on the deck of a ship. She was at the aft rail, staring down at the ship's foamy wake. The light daubing the foam was just turning pale pink. The temperature had plummeted overnight, and the sharp air stung Mosca's cheeks and brought cold tears to her eyes.

The previous afternoon, Arvor Beech had been pronounced the new mayor of Corseul. No one had protested and no one had suspected interference with the voting. Pontivy, restored to calm, had graciously accepted the results. Beech had paid Mosca in full, her promised share and Clent's, less what they had taken out for expenses. In the evening Mosca had reunited with Clent in a nearby village, just as planned. By crisp starlight they had crossed the sinking causeway over the marshes. They had reached the port an hour before their ship was to sail.

It was over, and they were leaving. Foreign shores waited to receive them.

Distantly, Mosca wondered when she would begin to feel seasick. She had read vivid accounts of the affliction in chapbooks about sea voyages, but so far her small breakfast showed no signs of deserting her. Behind her she could hear the sailors calling fresh and bright nautical terms to each other, and she hoped the voyage would not be too quick.

Clent strolled up and leaned heavily against the railing beside her. He did look slightly green.

"I see your eyes turned back, Mosca. You are trying to spy the city on the horizon, no doubt perplexed. Surely your memory must be playing you tricks. Surely Mosca Mye, that inestimable agent of change, that very avatar of chaos, cannot have passed through Corseul and left it standing firm on its foundations?"

"Mr. Clent…"

"It is well-nigh impossible for me to credit the success of our endeavors. Yet however I may have feared the worst at times, your cunning mind and rebellious spirit have carried us through as lightly as a summer breeze. I have of late noticed a new refinement, almost an artist's flair in your most crooked, implausible plans. Perhaps you are leaving behind your first youth, and – "

"Mr. Clent…!"

" – finding your footing at last in this treacherous world, an odd-colored but resilient flower opening its petals to – "

"Mr. Clent! Shut your trap!"

And with a scorching glare at the astonished Clent, Mosca balled up her fists and stomped away, keeping her knees gently bent against the roll of the ship. She found their ill-lit cabin, pried Saracen away from his preoccupation with their meager and well-secured luggage, sat down on the bed with her arms full of goose, and pretended passionately not to burst into tears.

She was not sorry to leave the realm that had kicked her into the gutter and ground her teeth in the mud; she was not sorry to leave the behind the Locksmiths and the beadles and all the high and cozy folk who looked down on her; she expected to be less sundered, not more, from her friends in embattled Mandelion. Precisely what Mosca was mourning she could not articulate to herself. She held on to the knowledge that for once her choices had led her somewhere good. Perhaps she was only light-headed from success and sea air.

Saracen, perhaps sensing the gravity of her mood, submitted quietly to being wept upon. When he began to squirm, Mosca released him, wiped her face, and went back up on the deck. The sun was clear of the horizon. Mosca looked out onto the immense open sea and breathed the salt wind.


End file.
